Juan Felipe Herrera has become one of America’s most celebrated writers. Writing about growing up as a Mexican American in California, his work is often described as resisting narrative in favor of collage and experimental mediums.

Herrera is the current US Poet Laureate. He has published more than two dozen books, including books for children and works of fiction. We caught up with Herrera before his OSU commencement address and chatted about writing on political subjects.

Hannah Kroonblawd: We were wondering if you could talk with us about borders and erasing borders. Your work deals a lot with erasing and working with space on the page, and we’d love to hear about how that comes into play in your poetry.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Well, this is something we’ve dealt with all our lives, all of us. Linguistic borders, borders that have to do with knowing each other’s histories and herstories, international borders. We know very little, sometimes, about our poets in say, Chile, the new wave of Chileano poets that are in Santiago, poets in the very southern tip of Latin America. So we’re always having to deal with that. Sometimes we don’t notice it. It feels kind of natural, the world we live in. We kind of accept it. It’s one big agreement. Then we realize we’ve agreed to a very small world and have to struggle to get outside of the accepted limits that we live in. That’s true for our culture, that’s true for our language, that’s true for our literature and our art, and our lives.

And most of all that’s true for our own personal life. The things we consider, for the notions we have for each other, the notions we have for ourselves. That’s something we need to examine, to go beyond those limits that we have accepted for being a person who likes being alone, who doesn’t like certain people or certain styles. We have to get to the core of things: humanity, kindness, embracing all beings. It sounds easy. It sounds easy, but it is something we can easily work on. That’s the good part.

In terms of writing, well you know the parentheses on borders is right now, this political moment we’re in, that’s the big piece. Isn’t it? That’s the big piece. Being able to articulate and being actually concerned about the venomous borders that we seem to be creating every day. Between religions, United States and Mexico, our position in the world, our position as a nation in the world. And there are just so many pieces to it. Our relationship with other nations, our relationship with other cultures. We’re all here in the United States, actually. The globe itself is here – many cultures, many languages.

In the Sixties, it was called celebration. It was called let’s celebrate our culture, let’s celebrate all peoples. And then the celebration became a festival. And a festival’s not bad, but we need to go towards where the pain is. Why do I feel this way about Muslims? Why do I feel this way about African Americans or women or LGBTQ or trans youth or people who are homeless? Why do I not want to communicate with them? Why am I resisting building a real relationship with them?

HK: And do you feel that your hybrid work is hoping to push against these created borders?

JFH: It’s good to experiment. We have so much to play with these days. I used to hang out a lot in libraries, and bookstores, and magazine shops. The late seventies and early eighties were a time of magazines – the Andy Warhol interview magazine was fabulous. It was a large format with a lot of photographs, Andy Warhol-style, with a lot of interviews and wild fashion. All of us were kind of collecting magazines and reading those large-format magazines, so the image, fashion, faces, collages were really exciting.

Fashion, collage, serious interview, political statement, poetry with kind of a wild body, image, portrait, Warhol-style. So that was interesting. The Japanese fashion magazines, with Japanese characters on the cover, for me was very exciting.

And then City Lights, in San Francisco.

HK: The bookstore?

JFH: Yeah. So all that was all there.

So then we have the collage movement in the sixties, the collage movement back in the twenties. Photography, film. Warhol did a lot. I used to see Warhol films, underground films. So the film world, the photography world, the fashion world, pioneering artists and crazy photographers. I love photographers. Those were all available if you just scratched the surface of a bookstore, a people’s bookstore, a used bookstore, where I used to spend a lot time.

And cafes, all the free little magazines. They were very delicious. They were very delicious because they were free. So you know, if you would go into the Vesuvial Café in North Beach, you could have a little coffee, and who knows. So then you’d pick all that up. And you’d find out about poetry readings.

You’d go into the lobby, in North Beach, in the late seventies, early eighties, and you’d pick up a coffee or an espresso. And maybe there’s a friend you’re waiting for or maybe you’re just by yourself, and you’re going to write something, you’ve got your journal and a pen. But there’s a billion little free magazines and peoples’ newspapers and the Poetry Flash, which was the poet’s Bible. It was a tabloid, like a newspaper, and it would tell you where to submit poems to small publishers, chapbook contests, readings, reviews and essays, poets coming to town, a new book that just came out or a poet that was writing on something that was really interesting. I used to carry that all the time and just read it.

So all those different formats: magazines, fashion, film, underground films – we used to call them underground films, but now you just use an iPhone and shoot whatever you want to shoot. But back them everything was separated from everything. Photography over here, experimental photography over there, underground films over here, photo-magazines over there. But all of a sudden, in the mid-seventies or so, the early eighties, the magazine world kind of went bananas, which was great. And before that, we had the chapbooks in the sixties.

And of course a lot of poets.

Every part of it was fun. So I wanted to create collages and heavy-duty experiments, like a scientist in a lab. I wasn’t that interested in creating a book. I was just creating something right there on the spot, using some of these materials.

HK: Using experimentation?

JFH: Yeah, so it was like that, kind of a walking lab. I think that’s still around, but it’s no longer the coffee shop or the salon de café. It’s more of the Internet. That’s where you do things. New kinds of blogs, new kinds of literary magazines on the Internet.

So I always loved theatre, painting, magazines, photographs, images, underground or “alternative” art – it’s all alternative – risky stuff. And I always like to play with all of it. Writing poems and publishing them in a book is kind of limiting, but I’ve been doing it for so long that all of a sudden I kind of believe that’s what I believe I need to be doing.

But it’s really a bigger format, what’s going on. At the San Francisco airport – we stopped there on the way here – the whole wall, it’s a big old wall. Maybe 200 by 30 feet, one big prism of plastic colored tile. It looks like a cleaned-up Jackson Pollock painting. So that’s the airport. And if that’s the airport…

HK: Art in public spaces?

JFH: Yeah, and it was great. They have an art and disability exhibit… And I just couldn’t believe it. Working with collage and paper and crayons and pastels and slapping color on the walls.

So I think that’s where we’re at.

But I love it all. The more I can do it, the better, and I haven’t done it to the degree I want to do it.