Bonafide Rojas is one of those phenomenal poets you hear about before you hear or read their work. I first heard about him in the early 2000s thanks to Khalil Jacobs-Fantauzzi, who hosted multi-genre art tours and readings from the Bay Area to Puerto Rico to Cuba to New York. Even then, Rojas’ poetry was an inspiration to international poets for expanding the form, content and tone of contemporary poetry from soulful, duende-drenched odes to original authentic Slam to surrealism/ magical realism and beyond. What’s most impressive and enduring about Bonafide’s poems are their diversity in syntactical architecture, multiverse confessions, inventive forms and transformative life advice transmitted through an undeniable poetics seasoned in lived wisdom as well as spiritual and psychological resilience.
Last March, I finally met Bonafide (after twenty-five years of following his work) at a park in Paris in the twentieth arrondissement, while my one-year-old son played with his friends and us. Mike Ladd brought Bonafide through and we all had an exhilarating conversation about everything from how New York has changed over the decades, to favorite philosophers, current international political issues, shamanism, duende, the international poetry scene, Bonafide’s recent reading at Spoken Word Paris, his recent tours and, most exciting of all, his new book of poems elaborating on his family and fatherhood. Before he split to head to London, I got a copy of his newest book Excelsior: New & Collected Poems, which I couldn’t put down once I began reading it. Since then, I’ve taught Excelsior to my Creative Writing classes here in Paris. Rojas’ poems and band, The Mona Passage, thoroughly inspired my students as they modeled poems of their own after his. What follows is our conversation about Excelsior and everything in between.
NOTE TO READER: Use of the lowercase “i” and the use of “&” is intentional.
Malik Crumpler (MC): Off top, i’d say you’ve roughly generated or innovated at least 15 different forms or formulas for helping fellow poets write poems. When you’re creating these forms (thanks to refrains), are you building on previous ones or making new melodies, as in “refrigerator notes,” “ i am, i’m” or “note to self,” “funeral,” “45 years in” & other listings of locations and destinations?
Bonafide Rojas (BR): Definitely! i’ll start with the ones you mentioned, “Notes To Put On The Refrigerator” is directly influenced by “Days Like This” & is continued in “Notes To Self To Put On The Dresser,” all of them are designed in a way of presenting poetry by using the everyday theme as a poetic tool. “At My Funeral” is an instructional tool for my passing, everyone should have one, mine just happens to be a poem. The listing of locations, destinations, literary references & musical shoutouts is my obsessive nature of writing list poems, cataloging & documenting my life & showing love & admiration for these artists, writers & places that have developed my experience as a poet.
MC: In “Burning Down The House,” you say, “& the five most important poetry collections/that makes breathing possible (ask me which ones).” Okay, so which ones & maybe a sentence on why, how do they make breathing possible for you?
BR: When i wrote that i had poetry anthologies in mind, so here they are:
Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is the first anthology that influenced me: it gave me Pedro Pietri, Willie Perdomo, Sandra Maria Esteves, Tony Medina, Patricia Smith, Reg E. Gaines, Jessica Hagedorn & Sekou Sundiata. The vastness of that book is, you could focus on a chapter at a time & get so much inspiration from each one.
Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry Of Witness showed me how serious poetry should be taken, how it can be a tool for change & how it makes poets the documenters of the moment so that it’s not lost in revisionist history. I recommend this book to everyone.
20th Century Latin American Poetry is a bilingual poetry anthology focused on Latin America; there have been some that have come after that are more extensive, but this was put together by Stephen Tapscott, who was my favorite translator of Pablo Neruda’s poetry.
Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam is a book that was coinciding with the release of Def Poetry Jam but was a bit different than the show. The editors, Tony Medina & Louis Reyes Rivera, were two of my favorite poets, so when i was asked to submit, i was over the moon, it was my first publication release, they published “The Creed Of A Graffiti Writer.” The anthology really solidified the late 90s, early 2000s poetry.
Poems For The Millennium. i’ll focus on the first two volumes, which are massive, they have such range, but what i love is that they include manifestos for so many of the literary schools, Futurists, Dadaists, it expanded my palette on how i convey these. i can write so much more on this, but i’ll stop at these five anthologies.
MC: NYC, mother, family, migration, travel, child, gentrification, sports, music, dedication to craft (music, being, loving and poetry), the aging self & the aging city are enormous themes in your book. Place, time & memory weave together to coalesce in one fascinating journey or ancient odyssey. How difficult was it to arrange & sequence all of this, or was it more of an exercise in archiving?
BR: Sequence is important. I arranged the poems in Excelsior slightly differently in each chapter than they initially were published. Life:(Un)titled in the first chapter that stayed in its exact spot. One of the most intentional things i do with poems is consider how it will affect the reader & how will the next poem affect them, so i approach it in a way where there’s more of a fluidity than a rollercoaster. The hardest part was which poems to include from Pelo Bueno, When The City Sleeps & Renovatio because they’re whole collections, & honestly, i think i may have missed a poem or two. i love the poem “Mantra” in Renovatio, which was originally called “Searching For The Missing Words,” but i felt it needed a rewrite to reflect the current mood, so i rewrote it. i really enjoyed revisiting, remixing these poems i’ve had for 20, 12 & 10 years & making something new out of it.
MC: Your footnotes are wonderful. Is it more about making research for the reader less difficult or factually proving the reality of your memories, influences and, thus, references?
BR: The footnotes started as an idea for an earlier project which i didn’t pull the trigger for, but when Notes On The Return To The Island was finished, i included 70 “Notes” mainly because people don’t have an actual scope of how long Puerto Ricans have been in NYC or the fact that Puerto Rico is the oldest colony of the United States. This came to fruition when i was speaking to a brilliant Afrofuturist about liberation & they were unaware of Puerto Rico’s colonial status & they said, “Puerto Ricans have been here since the 70s, right?” & my response was, sharp & respectful “Moreeee like the 1870s.” So, with the seventy footnotes in Notes On The Return… that was the main purpose. Now with Excelsior, it’s a bit different, it’s now about consistency, but halfway through the footnotes, i realized how many references i made in my earlier work, so i really enjoyed that task of going back & picking what i wanted to highlight. The point of them is to share major influences & moments indeed, you’re spot-on with that observation, & it definitely makes them fun to read, even almost like a whole different story in the explanations.
MC: The music in your book seems effortless. How influential is your music on your poetry? We read about others’ music as an influence on you and your development as a composer and performer, but in terms of craft, how does it impact your poetry?
BR: i should’ve been a musician first because of the deep-rooted love i have for music. I was the kid who wanted to see who played on what, who influenced who, but that didn’t translate into me learning an instrument until later in my teens. Music is usually intertwined with my poetry, like a hidden joke, a secret i’m sharing but not telling you i am. There are song titles, lyrics throughout my work that i don’t cite for a reason, they’re for the music nerds, geeks & snobs, so when someone comes up to me & says, “I caught your reference to UNKLE’s ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights,’” that means to me that they really read the poem, they examined the line. Renovatio has a lot of musical references in it that are not so subtle. It’s one of my favorites things to do in my poems. Like, thank you for reading all of this, here’s a gift, a secret for you.
MC: Throughout your book, you show us while making us feel, smell, taste, bleed & even wait on trains in NYC in vivid details rarely seen by the folks who aren’t from there or haven’t lived there. Would you consider this book more of a time traveler’s guide to your NYC, the South Bronx and so on, more so than a museum of what NYC was? If this book was converted to virtual reality, would the musical references within it be the score? What music would you add to it not referenced in the book, possibly your own?
BR: This is a great question, certain poems, definitely “When The City Sleeps,” were a document of NYC to fight gentrification. So many places, spaces, locations were being torn down, replaced, built with something cold, glass, phallic & i really wanted people to know that NYC was this organically beautiful place due to negligence, that people of color transformed & built from the ruins up. The musical references would definitely be part of the soundtrack, opening track would be Nas’ “N.Y. State of Mind,” by the way. My music would be there in certain parts, like in a post-war, half-awakened sleep, i would put “Wanderlust” in it, when it gets chaotic i would put “Camisado” or “War Dogs.” My band is called The Mona Passage & it’s an extension of myself, of the rock & roll Puerto Rican who dreamt of playing live when he was 16. It’s a very different expression than poetry for me, it’s more focused, loud, powerful & movement based. Poetry is almost subconscious in creation, then only in editing does the focus & intent come in. The music isn’t a representation of NYC, it’s a representation of me.
MC: “Letter To My 20 Year Old Self” can be taken as a skeleton key to the book, I think, but from your perspective is the tradition of poetry really about saving & resurrecting, or something more or less as depicted in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus or Lorca’s Duende lectures? Do you consider yourself to be one with THE DUENDE, lord knows I see you as an absolute conduit of duende!
BR: Thank you, i feel like i am in tune with the duende, being such an admirer of Lorca’s work for so long, couple that with Neruda’s work, & reading them at such a young age, i know it had a heavy influence on how i approach emotion, expression & authenticity. Lorca’s Poet In New York & Neruda’s Residence On Earth were two books i carried with me everywhere & they completely inspired my writing about New York in a way that can show the reader how this megalopolis could be magical, in the same way that people spoke about European cities. Saving something, or saving the self, is a theme throughout my work, poetry & music. i feel salvation (in a non-religious sense), freedom, escape, living forever are things i touch on, growing up in such a constricting, repressive time in history.
MC: The humor throughout the book is unpredictable & exciting, such as the red socks pun…being that NY baseball fans are notorious for their rivalry with the Boston Red Sox. Would you say the book is full of innuendo such as this &, if so, how difficult or easy is that to get on the page as you do?
BR: There’s definitely innuendos & i surprised myself because i don’t write too many jokes on paper. People will testify that i am a hilarious bastard, a student of physical comedy, but when it came to writing, i took it very serious, too serious to make light, or to make people laugh, until i realized that there’s always room for laughter, even in the face of death. Laughing is necessary, so why not in my work? It is hard writing a joke that hits every time, it has to be either universally funny or off the wall, so i try to balance both. It is something that i am still working with, it has been bearing fruit.
MC: “Burning Down The House,” aside from being another reference to an excellent song by the Talking Heads, is also a fantastic form for illuminating what’s most important to a poet or person. Again, how did this form come to you, before or after compiling the poems for the book?
BR: In Renovatio, i was exploring how poetry, art & music reinvented me. There are poems that are specific to this writing prompt that i kept going to, i don’t know if anyone “invented” it, but i know i was doing it, so i took a song title, examined the song & decided whether or not i would write exactly what the song title was referencing or went on a mad dash of left-field metaphors & hysterics. “Burning Down The House” just felt like a very foresight-based recollection of what could & would happen if my apartment ever caught fire & let me tell you, i would definitely need more than 2 minutes [to get out], for the massive collection i own. Thousands of books, hundreds of pop culture collectibles, hundreds of shirts & classic rock paraphernalia, my guitar collection, oh the madness of it all!
MC: How important is surrealism or, as they call it, magical realism in your writing? Do you see it as a tradition or a necessity of thinking about life in general?
BR: i love surrealism & the surrealists, the dadaists: Breton, Tzara, Stephan Mallarmé (even though he’s considered a symbolist poet), Aragon, Vallejo, Desnos, Apollinaire & many others. Now with magical realism, i will confess my utter love & admiration for Gabriel García Márquez & 100 Years Of Solitude, which is my favorite piece of fiction. I own it in 4 different printings, including a first edition in English from the 1970s. Both literary movements have really allowed my imagination to flourish in the sense of how i adapted animation & science fiction. It allows everything to be combined with a political stance; it really is magical.
MC: Why John Pablo?
BR: 21 years ago before my son was born, i had a dream of an art show, i walked into the art show & i can’t remember the painting on the wall, it could’ve been a red painting, but i’m not entirely sure, but on that painting was the initials J.P.R. & i woke up & said John Pablo, my son’s name comes from my love for John Lennon & Pablo Neruda. He didn’t become a painter like i had initially hoped, but he is a fantastic cellist & i am so excited for what he’ll create. He might argue with the origin of his name, but i was there, he wasn’t yet.
MC: Metaphor or simile, what do you prefer as in “Dearest” & “The Rickety Boat” poems? Has NYC become both metaphor and reality for you? Is memory inevitably a metaphor & therefore poetic?
BR: i think memory is a tree in which i pick the fruit. i love metaphors, combining contrasting images together & being from NYC, we already say “like” for so many things, so similes are almost part of our vernacular. NYC is an old fantasy of the 90s & the reality of being sterilized by free-market capitalist investors. Everything is a reference point to another, NYC is no different, it just has a more personal emotional connection because of the relationship i have with the city. i love New York City but i also hate it.
MC: “The Old Machine” brings to mind Borges & Juan Rulfo & Gabriel García Márquez & Bob Kaufman. What pivotal role does the influence of these writers have on your work, what about Piñero & Ernesto Cardenal?
BR: Those are some big names you’re referring to. García Márquez was mentioned in a previous answer & i absolutely adore him. Borges & Rulfo are two examples of Spanish language excellence. Kaufman is a poet that i wish more people spoke about, his vow of silence alone is legendary. Piñero is that dude, very Lower East Side, very Nuyorican, very much the prototype for New York-based poets after him. i love Ernesto Cardenal because of his life as a poet, a Marxist & a priest; a liberation theologist Marxist Sandinista poet, his work is very important, i was very saddened when he passed. But out of all of them, Gabriel García Márquez has influenced me the most in terms of being imaginative & embracing magical realism as a tool for my work. “Old Machine” may be part of a larger work, but i’m still deciding on it.
MC: The teacher poem, “In Front of the Class” is epic. Are you still teaching & how important is it to you that poets teach?
BR: “In Front of the Class” is one of my most recognized poems due to its visibility on Def Poetry Jam, it is also over 20 years old. I am still teaching Creative Writing when i get hired for it & i think it’s important that poets teach, but more important that they inspire young people to read, love poetry & help shift their perspective. I know it sounds like a cliché, but poetry completely saved my life. By the time i started writing, i had been arrested 3 times, dropped out of high school, had a job that had me in NYC nightlife at 15, had a tense relationship with my father & had a tumultuous relationship with a woman i was dating. Poetry came in & transformed everything. All i had was poetry, everything else took a back seat.
MC: All in all, as in “The Most Beautiful Day” poem, this book is a book of praise, how important is praise in your daily life?
BR: i am grateful for everything, every day, because i know it can be taken in a split second or during a long, drawn-out stay in a hospital. Being grateful allows me to travel in this world with constant curiosity. Gratitude is never something a person could have too much of, imagine someone critiquing someone like, “they’re too grateful.” Naw, i’ll take that. That’s something to be worthy of being. i have the urge to write a praise poem every couple of years for only the sake of being grateful & reminding myself of that gratitude.
MC: Travel is a consistent part of the book, beginning with traveling on the trains in NYC to traveling the world. Where do you plan to go next?
BR: Well, by the time this is published i will have visited Prague, which i’ve never been to, & i was recently in Cleveland, Ohio for the first time too. They’re two very different places but that’s the beauty of traveling. i had a few gigs in Cleveland, which has a large Puerto Rican community, (shoutouts to Stephanie & TJ of Con Tu Live!) & Prague is an actual trip of leisure, which i rarely give myself, so i’ll enjoy both cities for different reasons. After that, i will prepare for June in New York which is very Puerto Rican heavy, very much an unofficial official Puerto Rican month, due to the parades & festivals. i’m hosting the Sunset Park Puerto Rican Festival after their parade & i’m very excited about that.
MC: Lastly, how important is performing your work live? Does it help you in revision or is all the revision before the stage, or is it page then stage then page again?
BR: i love performing, it helps me with revision. Reading a poem out loud allows my perspective of the poem to shift, i may edit it on the fly & see how it feels. You hit it right on the head, page then stage then page. i’ll play with first person-third person, flesh the poem out. It’s important for me to share space with an audience, i know my voice is different than the one in their head, so it makes a full cycle.
MC: When’s your next tour or performance or album or book coming out?
BR: Well, Excelsior was released in January 2024, i am working on a new Mona Passage record, tentatively titled Before The Dawn. That may change, but regardless, the lead single is called “Before The Dawn” (shoutouts to my guys in the band: Yabey, Pete Sustarsic & Jason Hendricks!). i’m working on a creative nonfiction project about my mother called Lament For Fela. It took a left turn recently, because i felt limited in just writing poems about her, so now it’s a whole different project, i’m very excited about it.
MC: Ceaseless merci beaucoups, Bonafide, for taking time out of your busy tour to talk about your life, books, music & craft. Looking forward to that new Mona Passage album & linking up next time you’re in Paris!
