The Belief That Poetry Is Soul-Work Drives My Poetic Practice
March 21, 2025
A Q&A with Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
In November 2024, poets from Beacon Press’s National Poetry Series and Raised Voices series gathered at a National Council of Teachers of English panel to discuss how they use poetry to explore themes such as family, history, and identity in their lives. Poetry and its ability to access truth can be a transformative experience as they explore writing about the complexities of their lives and the world around them. Lambda Literary Award winner Roque Raquel Salas Rivera was one of the panelists. His bilingual volume in the Raised Voices series, antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano, is a powerful, inventive collection that looks to the decolonial future of Puerto Rico with love, rage, beauty, and hope. What follows are his answers to the panel discussion questions.
Beacon Press: Tell us about your teaching practices. Where do you teach? Who are your students? What topics and texts do you cover? What are your goals as an educator?
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera: I’d like to begin by saying I am very sad Danielle cannot be present to answer these questions. Meeting her at the panel this last year was truly a blessing, and I will never forget how generous and kind she was.
I teach at the University of Puerto Rico. My students are almost all Puerto Rican, and I teach a variety of courses on Gender Studies, Cinema and Human Rights, Puerto Rican History and National Thought, Introduction to Literature—a wide range. I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and my dissertation focused on three poets: Julia de Burgos, Sotero Rivera Avilés, and Ángela María Dávila Malavé. I focus on anticolonial movements and decolonial poetics and have a strong interest in literature and poetry, which I integrate into most of my courses.
As an educator, my goal is to meet the student where they are and contribute to their awareness of themselves as guardians of their own histories, cultural production, and political power. I consider myself successful as an educator if I am empowering my students and helping them better understand themselves as thinkers and creators.
I am also an educator outside of institutions. I mentor younger poets and translators and often offer free community workshops. I consider the access I have had to different bodies of knowledge a privilege and one that should be shared.
BP: Tell us about your poetry practices. What topics and themes do you explore in your poetry? How have your family, history, and identity influenced your poetry?
RRSR: All the themes you have mentioned are present in my work. I would say my poetic practice is one that does not dictate or expect my work to have those or any specific themes. I am driven by the belief that poetry is soul-work, even though I am, by many standards, an atheist. What I call “soul-work” is the notion that there are many aspects of ourselves and the world we do not understand logically, and there are also things that come through the poems that can only exist in poetry. My commitment as a writer is to a practice, a search that does not hide that which is unpleasant and ugly, that does not assume what readers are or are not able to understand, and that opens a window into my language and experience of the world without sacrificing that which makes it mine. I believe great poets, like great musicians, have an allegiance to those who came before them, and a right to work within the specificity of their craft without having to justify it to the world. I also believe poetry should accompany collective liberation, but I am not one for dictating what that should look like. The poet Roque Dalton, whose name I have borrowed, once wrote the following:
Querido Jorge:
Yo llegué a la revolución por vía de la poesía.
Tú podrás llegar (si lo deseas, si sientes que lo necesitas) a la
poesía por la vía de la revolución. Tienes por lo tanto una ventaja.
Pero recuerda, si es que alguna vez hubiese un motivo especial
para que te alegre mi compañía en la lucha, que en algo hay que
agradecérselo también a la poesía.
My translation:
Dear Jorge,
I arrived at revolution via poetry.
You can arrive (if you so desire, if you feel the need) at
poetry via revolution. You therefore have an advantage.
But remember, if you ever find any special reason
to take pleasure in my company during the revolutionary struggle,
to some extent you’d also have to thank poetry.
BP: Do you find that your teaching and poetry practices shape one another? If so, in what ways?
RRSR: Of course. I think my life shapes my poetry and teaching is part of my life. I couldn’t tell you exactly how, but I am always learning new things through teaching and through just listening to my students. I think one would have to make a conscious effort not to learn, especially at a public university in a US colony.
BP: You use multiple languages in your poetry. Do you ever teach multilingual texts to your students? Are many of your students themselves multilingual, and if so, how does that shape the classroom experience? In general, how do you think languages relate to identity in poetry?
RRSR: Because of the colonial relationship between the US and Puerto Rico, and the fact that most Puerto Ricans on the archipelago speak Spanish, I teach in Spanish and try to provide texts in Spanish or translated into Spanish. I think most people assume that because I self-translate into English or publish dual-language books I move between languages in my classrooms. The truth is that I don’t ever reprimand students for using English in class, but I almost always translate what they are saying into Spanish so everyone can access it. I also provide source texts in English along with the translations when possible.
BP: Have you ever spoken with educators who are assigning your work in their classes? What was it like to hear about their teaching your work?
RRSR: I often have educators approach me to say they are teaching my work. It is exciting. Younger poets approach me as well to say they read me in a class. It makes me feel so grateful that younger trans poets read my poetry. That’s who I write for! Sometimes I ask questions about how they approach my work in class, but I tend to think each educator has their own style.
BP: You explore liminal identities in your work. Can you talk a little bit about this, and how students might use poetry and writing to explore the liminal aspects of their own identities?
RRSR: It depends on how you define liminal. Would being Puerto Rican in Puerto Rico really be liminal? Would being trans for a trans person be liminal? Maybe you could say being a trans Puerto Rican is liminal, but it shouldn’t be. I think if we added all the liminalities, we’d get a majority.
BP: The theme of last year’s National Council of Teachers of English conference is heart, hope, and humanity. We can all see and acknowledge that humanity is facing unprecedented challenges right now, from wars of imperialism and colonial domination to the acceleration of climate change to the rise of authoritarian governments. What do you see as the role of poetry during times like these, and how do we teach this to our students?
RRSR: I was recently invited to lead a conversation on revolutionary poetics during a one-strike at the university where I work. The students, workers, and professors were and are protesting the proposed closure of sixty-four programs, which include Puerto Rican history, literature, and many others. Since the Department of Education cut PR history as a requirement, the first time that many students encounter the history of their own country is at the university. Cutting these programs will have a devastating impact on our archives and collective memory.
Right now, there is a project called Esencia, which developers are trying to impose on the people of Cabo Rojo, which will essentially (pun intended) be a plantation-style mega-development for the tourism industry. It is like that Chuwi song “Mundi” says: “La gente venía a mirarme / Por mi belleza admirarme / Pa’ después olvidarme / Este sitio es un zoológico / Que se está derrumbando.” Or: “People came to look at me / to admire my beauty / And later forget me / This place is a zoo / That is collapsing.” That’s what it feels like to be a puertorriqueño in Puerto Rico, like a zoo animal in a beautiful cage. Being trans makes it more intense. There is an active effort to erase us, to make us disappear, even as we are subject to stares, as spectacle. That is why I wrote a trans epic, to create memories in the face of our erasure, to write a history in my own voice. I don’t think I have to tell my students why that is important. They can see it themselves when they engage with the material, through our debates and just by having a trans Puerto Rican as their professor. They value me as I value them, because we are in this together.
About Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. His honors include being named the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia and receiving the New Voices Award from Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra. He is the author of five previous full-length poetry books. His third book, lo terciario/the tertiary, won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. His fourth book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was longlisted for the 2020 Pen America Open Book Award and was a finalist for CLMP’s 2020 Firecracker Award. His fifth book, x/ex/exis, won the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. He currently writes and teaches in Puerto Rico.