I’m pleased to bring you my second in-person
interview, this time with Jose Faus. In
addition to being an internationally-recognized visual artist with murals on
display in Mexico and Bolivia, Jose is a poet, playwright and community
volunteer. He was kind enough to sit
down with me last week and share some of his incredibly rich, diverse
experiences with poetry and the arts, as well as some of the personal journey
that stoked his seemingly boundless creativity.
Let’s go.
Lauren: How do you
feel your painting interacts with your writing?
How do the two mediums balance out?
Jose: I hate the
separation. I’m an artist. Period.
Writing is art. It’s a different
way of creating. Like painting, it involves
images. It’s like radio vs.
television. With TV, as with painting, you
trust what you see. With radio, as with
writing, it’s up to the listener to conjure the images.
As an artist, some things come more readily
when I’m writing than when I’m painting.
Painting is more emotionally felt for me. Colors can work against each other. I remember when I realized that, I was
painting a creek bed, and suddenly, I painted a log a particular color that
made it pop out. It struck me how
powerful that is. Words also rub up
against each other. There are things
they do for which color is insufficient.
But sometimes words can be too strict, which sends me back to my brushes
and paint.
Lauren: In your artist
statement, you talk about being concerned with the individual and the
communal. You paint murals, which often
mean other people are involved in painting them. Tell us about some of your collaborations and
how that affected your work.
Jose: Collaboration
leads to discovering unexpected commonalities. It also takes work in new directions. Working with others, you get a lot. I’m always afraid I’ll override someone else,
but that doesn’t ever happen. It’s like
call and response. It’s beautiful.
I’ve been on a panel in the Association
of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and at a poetry festival Split This Rock with the Latino Writers
Collective and we presented a reading about displacement. I’ve participated in
several rengas in the past few years, at least five. Two were with the Latino Writers Collective
and one was for those readings. One was
called America: Here & Now. It wasn’t just
poetry, either, it was visual art and performance. Thirty local poets participated, including
myself. Miriam Carymn Goldberg did a renga
about Kansas, which drew 150 poets together.
I worked with the sculptor, Matthew
Dehaemers, on a piece about the immigrant experience. Matt is of Dutch descent. He did the visual pieces and I did a series
of poems from the Dutch family’s point of view.
Immigration has become this politically-charged subject. It’s become associated with Latinos, but
people still come here from other countries.
All immigrant stories are essentially the same. They come to America in search of
opportunity. They arrive, they toil,
they learn the language, they assimilate.
They shed their old identity. The
following generations lose their traditions.
Then, at some point down the line, there’s the rediscovery. Matt found he had to re-create and compose
his own history.
Another collaboration project I did was
through the Jewish Community Center Fellows program. [Click here for YouTube video of the
performance.] I worked with a dancer, Anjali
Tata Hudson, to write a poetry/performance piece. The theme was resistance. We incorporated
Jewish traditions, consulted with rabbis and Jewish artists, studied art that
came out of concentration camps. It was
about a woman expressing her relationship to rabbinical law. I learned so much. The rhythm of my words had to be precise to
fit with the dance. It reinforced things
I’ve always thought about writing and art.
I had to think about balancing the words and the silences. Thelonious Monk’s music is the silence
between the notes. You have to give as
much weight to what’s between the words.
It taught me to pay attention to those elements.
I wish I could keep doing things like
that but—you know. Money and time.
Lauren: As a Latina,
I’m always interested to hear about other families’ experience in coming to
this country. Will you tell us about
that?
Jose: Yes, I came
here when I was nine. My real father had
disappeared when I was three. I feel no
real connection there. I have two or
three concrete memories, pictures.
That’s it really. I’m in contact
with some of his family from Spain. But
my mother got remarried and moved to the States with my sister. My brother and I lived with my grandparents
for a while, until we were sent for. It
was a strange time, a sort of arrested development. Back in Colombia, life had very different
rhythms, different customs, different sounds, different relationships. Then suddenly, everything changed.
When I came here, the first lesson was
that I was brown and there would be issues with that. My stepfather warned me about it. I never knew brown was a distinction. I’m not saying there isn’t racism in Colombia
because there is. I was just too young
to understand, but coming here made me realize, maybe earlier than I would
have. I had cousins, one was light
skinned with light eyes. Rafael was
dark. The rest of us fell somewhere in
between. So not only was racism an
issue, there was no support. No one ever
told me that it wasn’t right.
We lived on the West Side for two or
three years, in an apartment. My brother
and sister and I went to Redemptorist. Then
my sister and brother went to Queen of the Holy Rosary in Overland Park. I went to public school. We had to take the bus on I-35. I was the oldest, so I had to walk the others
to and from school.
Lauren: Did you speak
English when you came here?
Jose: No, no English. Just the little we’d learned in school back
in Colombia. We didn’t know we were
coming here till about a week before we got on the plane. So we were not prepared. But we were so young. If someone had told us any sooner and maybe
they did, it wouldn’t have been real, it wouldn’t have sunk in, you know? We had no clue at all.
It took me about a year and a half to
learn English. At Redemptorist, we were
the weird kids—it was predominantly Latino, but most of them didn’t speak
Spanish that well, so they were always asking us how to say something in
Spanish. My mother was a dancer. She taught physical education at
Redemptorist. But her English was so
heavily accented, we were embarrassed.
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Avenue of Murals, Kansas City, KS |
Jose: It’s the sad
thing about being bilingual—being embarrassed of the accent. My mother knew it was bad. So at home, she made us speak nothing but
English. I love English, but as a
result, I’m not as good at Spanish as I should be. Till I was 18, I hardly spoke it. Then I got a job with La Flor de Mayo in the
Westside delivering tortillas. We stopped at La Fama bakery and a worker spoke
to me in Spanish and I responded in Spanish without even realizing that I’d
done it. My co-worker said, “Dude, you
didn’t tell me you spoke Spanish.” I was
like, “I don’t.” It took something like
that for me to realize. I didn’t know my
English still had an accent. From then
on, I embraced it. Now, I read a lot in
Spanish. It’s definitely affected my
relationship with language.
Robert Frost said, “Poetry is what gets
lost in translation.” Now I try to read
Spanish literature, then read the English translation and compare. I try to write in Spanish. I submitted some poetry to a journal in
Madrid. They published it, but the
editor said it was an interesting mix.
They said it had an “immigrant voice,” that the expression was “simplistic.” Again, that’s how it is with being
bilingual. The primary language becomes
secondary. It’s hard to admit you can’t
do it.
When I studied at UMKC, we covered lots
of authors—English, Irish, American, even some French. But hardly any Spanish. Then I discovered One Hundred Years of Solitude. From
there, I began to seek out Spanish writers.
I discovered how language can have so much meaning, so much nuance. I appreciate the richness and ambiguity, the contradictions
and beauty.
Lauren: Who are your
favorite writers?
Jose: Marquez, Mario
Vargas Llosa, Alexandre Dumas, Bolaño, Machado, Montalban, Lorca, Neruda,
Whitman, Eliot, Faulkner, Kerouac. So
many. I love myths. The
Iliad and The Odyssey were the first
books the librarian gave to me here. She
was like a mother to me. She gave me
those, and The Count of Monte Cristo, lots
of adventure books. I love
mysteries. Lately, I’ve been reading Andrea
Camilleri. I love private eyes. I love Carlos
Ruiz Zafon.
I always have books in my bed. I sleep on them.
Lauren: When did you
become an artist?
Jose: I know exactly
when. I was taking classes at JCCC. I had declared as a political science major,
so most of the classes I’d taken had been geared around that. I had about 21 credits under my belt. Then one day, my brother said to me, “You
know, you like to draw. I’m taking a
drawing class right now. You could sit
in on it. There are nude models.” He knew just what to say to get me in
there.
It was a Life Drawing class. The teacher was a little suspicious but she gave
me a big piece of paper and sat me on the floor to draw. So I just did it, I just started drawing. The teacher told me, “You’re welcome to come
anytime.”
That was the turning point for me. I can be an impulsive person, so just like
that, I changed majors. My academic
advisor was so mad! I threw out the
credits I had and just started over.
Writing came naturally along with the drawing and painting. I moved to Westport, started attending Penn
Valley. I got my associate’s, then went
to UMKC.
Then I didn’t do art for 15 years. I got a job at a law firm.
Lauren: So how did you
get back to art?
Jose: About three
years before I quit the law firm, I’d gotten a studio and had been doing some
creating. My ex and I had separated, but
we still saw each other. One day, we
were sitting together on the porch, drinking wine. The law firm had sent me to North
Carolina. It was supposed to be for just
a couple of weeks, but it turned into a year and a half. I came back, then they told me they wanted me
to go to Philadelphia. I didn’t want to
go to Philadelphia. So I gave them six
months’ notice and cashed in my retirement funds.
Lauren: What do you
think poetry is? What should it do?
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Unbearable Lightness (2004) |
Jose: For me, it definitely
has a function and a purpose. It’s very
personal. I think all art is like that,
and I struggle with it sometimes. It can
be utilitarian, like a greeting card. It
can make someone feel good.
But as the writer, if you’re in the
throes of writing a love poem, in the grip of that emotion, all these other
things happen. It’s activist. It’s responding to injustice. I have tried to find a way to say that in a
poem. But no matter what I write, people
bring their own stuff to it. I just
accept that. I don’t dwell. I went through a period where I romanticized
poetry, that we poets are like the canary in the coal mine. But no one values us that way. Thinking that way makes us suffer needlessly.
Not too long ago, I heard this
commercial for cigars. They say that
smoking one of their cigars creates a better moment only comparable to the
birth of the first child. That pissed me
off. Poetry combats commercialism. Don’t try to tell me what a real moment is! That, to me, is poetry. Making the extraordinary ordinary, and the
ordinary extraordinary. Elevating
moments. The role of the artist is
sometimes to hide, and sometimes to expose, to dig around, to find the lint in
your belly button and throw it at someone.
Lauren: Would you say
your work has particular themes or motifs?
Jose: I don’t think
about themes, but I know they’re there. Relationships. Forms of love—giving and taking. Myths.
Society. In my longer poems, I
try to investigate things I don’t agree with and communicate my point of
view—that’s my poli-sci major showing up again.
And nature. Especially things that affect us physically:
wind, birds, sounds. For a while, I
dated someone in Washington MO. I’d take
the train to go out and visit her. I got
caught up in watching the countryside from the moving train, the plains, the
rivers. Once, when I rode out to see
her, there had been a flood. It changed
the topography. It had turned the land
into something new. That was the
inspiration for my poem, “The Water Moves in Circles About My Speech.”
I feel like we are so removed from the
land. We retreat from it. My work is about the loss of nature. It’s something we lament, but keep looking
for it. We accept our role in the world,
but we mourn what we’ve lost.
Lauren: Do you think
poetry should be accessible?
Jose: I think it
should be whatever the poet wants. But
don’t get upset if the reader gives up on you, or if they see more than you
intended. Some poets really try my
patience! I know it’s unpopular, but
Pound drives me mad. Some poets intrigue
me. I can’t understand them on a first
read, but I keep reading. Berryman is
like that, Jorie Graham. I’m fascinated
by some stuff younger poets are doing, their wordplay, their
stream-of-consciousness, the way they cut the syntax.
But you can’t like everything. A conceptual Epic Lyryc Poem, He basically
just cut and pasted rap lyrics that referenced the word Lyric or lyrical. It makes me so tired. It just doesn’t work for me. It’s not lyrical just because you say it is!
But you just don’t know who your work is
going to resonate with. Working with students
at Paseo High School on the Poetry Out Loud series, I met this African-American
student. She was fifteen or
sixteen. She read some Gertrude Stein. I don’t care for Stein. I would not have imagined Stein would appeal
to a young, inner-city student. But that
poem really meant something to her regardless.
I read the poem and got into the rhythms of it in helping her with it
and have read some now. You just don’t know where the art is going to get in. When it does, it’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter what the poet does. Someone’s going to get it. Someone’s going to read and go, “Damn.”
Lauren: Do you have a
writing routine?
Jose: Tried
that. No. I’m not a guy who gets up early in the
morning. But I don’t feel guilty about that. Being an artist is hard enough.
Richard Blanco spoke to the Latino Writers
Collective once and he said he finishes a book and then goes off and ruminates
for six months. I’m more like that. Ideas don’t come formed. I carry thoughts around for a long time. By the time I write it down, I’ve thought
about it so much, then it is formed. I have to work on a computer, though, because
I can’t read my own writing.
Lauren: What are you
working on right now?
Jose: I’m working
with a printmaker. It’s called the
Broadside Project. It will be a collaborative
print that will include text. We will produce ten prints, one for the
Greenlease exhibition and one for a traveling show and some of for each of us
collaborators.
I’m also working on a solo project with Spartan
Press—their Twelve Poets in Twelve Months series. My deadline is May. I’m writing poems about KC. I’ve lived here so long, I’m so wrapped up in
things going on here. I have poems about
streets, about 39th Streeet, 39th and Main, about other
intersections. 18th and Vine,
Independence and Vine, Southwest Boulevard.
Lauren: What are your
goals?
Jose: I’d love to
read in Colombia someday, at a festival.
Everyone’s there because they want to hear poetry. In his autobiography Neruda talks about a
reading he did in Minas Gerais in a full soccer field, silence fell because all
the workers were there to hear poetry speak.
In Mexico, when we finished up a mural, there
was a big celebration in town to celebrate its completion. They had flamenco dancers, local dances, and
a declamador or reciter of poetry. The declamador
was a real diva. I mean, this guy shows
up in a cape. Then he takes the stage. Seven or eight hundred people had showed up
from all around. Rich landlords,
politicians, campesinos, indigenous people.
When the declamador stood up, he had the whole stage. The audience went silent. He recited this piece that was obviously
well-known. The poem built and built, a
poem about accepting identity. Embracing
identity after running from it, after denying it. Fifteen minutes of reciting. His voice grew and grew, so when he got to
the end, “¡Yo soy indio!” he shouted
it out.
The people there knew the lines. Their anticipation built during the poem. They had tears in their eyes. When he finished, there was this silence,
then an eruption of applause. It was so
powerful.
To live, to love, to have it speak
through you. It was one of the richest
experience of my life. Such a thing
would never happen here. I would trade
everything to have that, to live life so dangerously close to that edge.
Purchase Primera Pagina at Amazon
About Jose Faus
José Faus is a native of Bogota,
Colombia and longtime Kansas City resident. He received degrees in Studio
Art/Painting and Creative Writing/Journalism from UMKC. He is a founding member
of the Latino Writers Collective and serves on the boards of The Writers Place,
Latino Writers Collective and Nuevo Eden.
He maintains a studio practice at
caridostudio in downtown Kansas City, Kansas. He has been involved in many
mural works in the Kansas City area and Mexico and most recently Bolivia, where
he received a cultural ambassador grant from the U.S. State Department. He is a
recent recipient of Rocket Grant for the community project VOX NARRO.
His writing appears in the anthologies; Primera Pagina: Poetry From the Latino
Heartland, Cuentos del Centro:
Stories From the Latino Heartland and will appear in the forthcoming Working: In the Red and the Black from
Helicon Nine Press, Raritan, Luces y Sombras and I-70 Review. His work has also appeared in Present Magazine. He is the 2011 winner of Poets & Writers
Maureen Egen Writers Exchange award.
Connect with Jose
Website: www.caridostudio.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jose.faus
Thanks for reading! Please feel free to leave questions/comments below.
If you love poetry, check out these poets: Scott Burkett, Angela M. Carter, Jeanette Powers, T. L. Washington, and Nicky Yurcaba.