Luis J. Rodriguez: California Poets Part 5, Four Poems

Luis J. Rodriguez

December 22nd, 2022

California Poets: Part V

Luis J. Rodriguez

Four Poems

Make a Poem Cry

“I can’t see ‘em coming from my eye, so I had to make this poem cry.”

—Jimmy McMillan, an incarcerated poet in California’s prison system.

You can chain the body, the face, the eyes,

the way hands move coarsely over cement

or deftly on tattooed skin with needle.

You can cage the withered membrane,

the withered dream,

the way razor wire, shouts, yells, and batons

can wither spirit.

But how can you imprison a poem?

How can a melody be locked up, locked down?

Yes, even caged birds sing,

even grass sprouts through asphalt,

even a flower blooms in a desert.

And the gardens of trauma we call the incarcerated

can also spring with the vitality of a deep thought,

an emotion buried beneath the facades

deep as rage, deep as grief,

the grief beneath all rages.

The blood of such poems, songs,

emotions, thoughts, dances,

are what flow in all art, stages, films, books.

The keys to liberation are in the heart,

in the mind, behind the cranial sky.

The imagination is boundless,

the inexhaustible in any imprisoned system.

And remember—we are all in some kind of prison.

If only the contrived freedoms

society professes can flow from such water!

The peace of death in life

Heroin’s soundtrack—bitches brew.

Trumpets like trains squealing around a bend,

the way rainwater murmurs along a concrete river.

Skulls whispering you to sleep.

Pain awash in glows from the tip of the toes,

through legs, streaming through the pit of a stomach,

coloring the whole body in hazy blue wash.

Miles knew the chords to blow.

I chipped to soften the edge when things got bad.

When it did, I didn’t want to be around anyone,

stashed among my own ere and score, loitering

inside my own high, in my own morose pose.

Yet Micaela and homie Sharky often joined,

even a jaina or two, and strangers, as rain drops fell.

I recall the headstones of Evergreen Cemetery,

where I leaned back to nod,

and scribble in torn pieces of papers

poems tracked with collapsed veins.

I recall my small garage room,

with no running water or heat,

and feeling the peace of death

cover me as a white sheet in my collapse.

The shadows felt so compelling.

Even when I stopped breathing,

and homeboys forced me up,

ice in pits and groin,

milk injected to un-sing the song.

To quit, I had to accept

never ending ache—

numbness only meant demise.

Now constant pain

is constant reminder—

a holy surrender—

life is pain. Pain is life.

When the pain’s gone, so am I.

TWO LOS ANGELES POEMS For the thousands of homeless people in Los Angeles who we can't forget

Songs Over Sidewalks Every summer when Santa Ana winds scatter around dry leaves and dead tree branches, and droughts make kindle out of the formerly green, a human hand or lightning strike can awaken the fire in all things, fire that also burns inside each of us, becoming the searing soul-birth of creativity—and of dirt, seed-ground for new plants, flowers, regeneration. Wildfires are metaphor and reality for our internal and external terrains. Things come back, but not always like before. There’s a natural order to life, a rhythm we often miss, but the tones persist despite our lack of hearing, of paying attention—or just ignoring. Tempos and beats come at us every day, every hour, in dark and in light, as drops of water or gust-hands on our faces and backs. Los Angeles is music but also muscles, a rain dance often with no rain, neon glare and smog-tinged skyline, held together in a spider-web called freeways, a place where even Jacarandas and palm trees are transplants. This city gives and takes away, but in nature whatever is removed is returned, even if in surprising ways, unexpected, with a twist. The human way is too chaotic, nonsensical, although laden with inventiveness. Buildings are bricked, stuccoed, and nailed together with stories, survival stories, war stories, love stories, the kind of harrowing accounts Los Angeles exudes at 3 am, when ghosts meander the upturned pavement, rumble by on vintage cars, and all night diners convert to summits for the played out, heartsick, and suicidal—fodder for Hollywood scripts or L.A. noir novels. There’s a migrant soul in this rooted city, Skid Row next to the Diamond District, waves of foam against barnacled piers, cafes and boutiques next to panaderias and botanicas. Ravines and gulleys turn into barrios; rustic homes with gardens dot bleak cityscapes; and suburbs burst with world-class graffiti. Fragmented yet cohesive, Los Angeles demands reflection of ourselves, and the unstable ground we call home. As in nature, the inequities can be breached, the gaps bridged, for home is also an invitation to care, to do whatever balances, whatever complements, whatever unites and clarifies, as poverty, violence, and uncertainty shake up safety and sanity. The key is for human law to align to natural law, for people to proclaim “enough is enough” and “what I do matters,” with deep examination, proper adaptation, full cognizance. No persons should die for lack of a roof or food or compassion. As John Fante would say, they are “songs over sidewalks,” imaginations on the interchange, humanity that deserves connection, touch, breath. These roads, bridges, alleys also contain concertos. Breezes over ocean’s darkest depths are rife with harmonies. And a howling moon and red sunset serve as backdrops for every aching interlude, soundtracks to revive the inert. Los Angeles is where every step rhymes, where languages flit off tongues like bows across strings, skateboarders and aerosol spray cans clatter as daily percussion, and angels intone “we can do better,” while haggling at garage sales. ##

Grime and Gold

1.

Soft wind curling dust.

Cars & trucks lend rhythm

to a Pacoima viaduct dance

with plastic bags,

fast food cartons,

leaves and scrap paper,

trapped in a milky way

on the ground.

Under the roadway, as tires and engines growl above,

a houseless man among an enclave of weathered tents

sits on a bucket, his arms splayed

over a splintered plywood board

on a makeshift desk of boxes.

He draws.

Next to him, an illustrated book of birds,

dirt crusted into cracks of spine and cover.

Using a pencil, the man carefully

incisions the lines,

methodically shades in

a spectrum of black to grey,

on a torn sketchbook page

—his most valued asset—

in a place of no assets

except for what sings in his bones.

He draws

and the city breathes with him:

no smog,

no industry,

no rumbling soundtracks from above.

The birds the air,

the land,

the sun,

the trees,

the earth.

On that blank paper

the man designs another landscape

with no poisons,

with new roads

that curve toward new homes.

He draws birds,

yet I witness in his hand what launches

new spaces,

new parks,

new abodes

where everyone belongs,

where nobody has to stake a claim,

because all are claimed,

where no one is blocked from flowering

so birthings appear all the time,

everywhere,

every day,

every hour,

every click

of a clock’s seconds hand.

The drawn birds polished from grime

to gold,

How the more you excavate,

the finer things become,

how the lines

fly

fly

fly

in a vortex of dust and cartons.

##

Interview

January 28th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Luis J. Rodriguez, Poet, Novelist, Journalist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Los Angeles is at the heart of your life and work. It’s also the city that you served, from 2014 to 2016, as poet laureate. What sets LA apart from other places in the world and what did you do during your tenure to enrich the literary and cultural landscape?

LJR: The Los Angeles poetry scene is one of the largest in the country. I’ve lived in the great poetry towns of San Francisco and Chicago. Amazing poetry centers! Beats and Slams from those cities. But L.A. in its expanse probably has more open mics, cultural cafés, and street poets. When Hip Hop came here, it got transfigured. Los Angeles changes every culture it touches while creating new expressions. There’s an L.A. style to everything.

Before becoming Los Angeles Poet Laureate, I “made my bones” in the poetry scene from the late 1970s when I took part in the East L.A. literary scene. I worked with, and one time directed, the L.A. Latino Writers Association and ChismeArte Art & Literary magazine. I served as poetry curator of Galeria Ocaso in Echo Park. After 1985, I lived in Chicago, including being active in the poetry scene there, until I returned to L.A. in the year 2000. I’ve also written iconic books about the city such as “Always Running” and “The Republic of East Los Angeles.”

As L.A. Poet Laureate, I conceived and published the largest anthology of L.A. writers to date, “Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles,” edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Daniel A. Olivas, and Ruben J. Rodriguez. I engaged some 35,000 people during an estimated 300 events in libraries, bookstores, literary festivals, and community centers. I spoke to millions more in Spanish-and-English language mass media.

DG: The road to becoming LA’s poet laureate wasn’t a neat one. The challenges you faced early in life were immense—violence, drug use, and legal troubles were quickly leading you down the wrong path. How did you overcome these difficulties and turn your life around to arrive at the success you’ve had?

LJR: Poetry found me despite being in a gang, using heroin and other drugs, in and out of jails and juvenile hall including two adult facilities, and living in the streets for three years. It shouldn’t have happened. But when it did, I never let it go.

For one thing, I was a working-class youth. Most gang members from the poorest neighborhoods are. They end up leaving gang life by “maturing out”—getting jobs, married, entering school, etc. (the ones active in the higher echelons of crime have a harder time leaving, if at all). When I was nine years old, my mother woke me up one morning and said, “It’s time for you to work.” That’s because she picked cotton at age nine in south Texas. My mother had me take an old rusty push lawn mower and go door to door to work on people’s “lawns,” although most yards were dirt and weeds. Even in the worst periods of “The Crazy Life,” I had jobs here and there. The ones who did not have this discipline, with families that were unable to find work or pushed out of whatever economy existed, had the hardest time. They all could make it, but street life is dangerous to one’s health. I, myself, got shot at half a dozen times (although never hit), overdosed on drugs three times, and had a razor blade up against my neck in jail. But I survived. Around twenty-five of my homies and acquaintances did not. Eventually to get out of crime and violence, in my late teens and early twenties I worked as a truck driver, in a steel mill, a lead foundry, a paper mill, a refinery, and in construction. When I gave up all this work to write professionally, the value of hard work instilled in me became crucial.

Secondly, I loved to read. On the street, my refuge was downtown’s central library. Books fired up my imagination. I read science fiction, mysteries, poetry, and illustrated children’s books like “Charlotte’s Web.” Authors like Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Nikki Giovanni, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), among others.

Finally, I had mentors such as a youth worker who taught me the politics of the radical wing of the Chicano Movement. Also, a couple of women counselors as well as a teacher who guided me through the uncertainties of adolescence. I had mentors in mural painting and photography. They didn’t “save me,” but gave me the tools, connections, and resources to save myself.

DG: The things you experienced as a young adult served as the material for the autobiographical book, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA (1993). Hugely successful and widely praised, it not only recounted your life, but also showed that redemption is possible. Though it’s probably a combination of all these things, what was the main impetus behind why you wrote the memoir? To reach young people in the same place you once were? To portray life in a specific part of Los Angeles? Or simply to tell your own story?

LJR: “Always Running” was written to address all those issues. The main impetus, however, was to reach my oldest son Ramiro who had joined a gang in Chicago. He had gotten into drugs and crime like I had. But this was during the 1990s—the worst period of gang violence in U.S. history. Ramiro ended up doing some fifteen years in prisons and other institutions, including a thirteen-and-a-half-year stretch. “Always Running” initially didn’t help my son. I did help many of his homies. I managed gang intervention with other gang youth and spoke and did workshops in juvenile detention centers and jails. I helped start non-profit youth groups. One day, seven years into his last prison sentence, Ramiro called me to say he finally understood what I was trying to do with my book and the work in the streets. He decided to quit gangs, drugs, and “pruno” (prison “moonshine”). This was dangerous. He insisted on not going into “protective custody,” to stay on the main line. He got targeted. He fought frequently. Besides gang members, he had to deal with prison guards. But Ramiro stood firm. Eventually they all let him go. When he got out of prison at age 35, having spent his twenties and early thirties in the joint, he emerged gang-free, drug-free, and crime-free.

DG: With It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing you went back to memoir. Now a father, you describe the parenting challenges early in your life and the eventual path to redemption. Were you trying not to repeat your father’s mistakes or hoping to keep your kids from making the mistakes you once made?

LJR: I was not properly “fathered.” I had a dad who worked and came home, but he was emotionally distant. Mom “raised” the four kids Dad had with her (my father had four other kids in Mexico, only one of which moved to the U.S.). I knew many homies who had no fathers. However, my dad didn’t abandon me just once, but every night. I didn’t want to be like him. The truth is I was too young when I had my oldest kids—Ramiro and my daughter Andrea. I was 20 years old when I married their mother, who was only two months out of high school. We broke up after three-and-a-half years. Ramiro was two years old, Andrea ten months. I lost my family, and soon my connection to the kids. I ended up abandoning Ramiro and Andrea when I left my industrial work to become a journalist, and later a poet and fiction writer.

When I moved to Chicago, Ramiro was ten and Andrea eight. “It Calls You Back” is about how all this led my oldest kids rejecting me, particularly Ramiro. Their mother remarried and lived with other men. During the turmoil of my twenties, I ended up with two wives, lived with two other women, and had other girlfriends. This was hard for my oldest children. Finally, at 31, I got together with my third and current wife Trini. I had two more sons with her, Ruben and Luis. My oldest kids were by then troubled teens. I had to deal with my own abandonment issues and the resultant rage disorder. Close to age forty, I finally became sober after eight years of heavy drugs followed by twenty years of drinking. I learned to heal on the “Red Road”—Native American spiritual practices. My teachers were Mexica (Aztec), Lakota, Diné (Navajo), Mayan (from Mexico and Guatemala), and even Quechua from Peru. Also, I dedicated myself to revolutionary politics as well as poetry. This is how I dealt with how the madness of my youth tried to call me back.

DG: You ran for Governor of California in 2014 and 2022. What are things you would have done or changed had you won?

LJR: I had a couple of slogans: "Imagine a new California for shared well-being” and “Dream & Deliver.” I felt there was little or no imagination in politics. Everything became “practical” but also performative. I wanted to galvanize those people who felt betrayed by the Republican and Democrat parties. Without corporate funds, I went up and down the state with community support. In my last campaign, the Green, Peace & Freedom, and Justice parties endorsed me. My main issue was to end poverty in California, taking up Upton Sinclair’s campaign of the 1930s.

In the first campaign, I was able to join community leaders when they started the California Union of the Homeless, which now has over 20 chapters and more than 25,000 members. In the second campaign, I garnered 125,000 votes, people willing to stand up for a new vision, a new California. Even though I didn’t win, we drew national attention to why the fourth largest economy in the world, California, should also have the largest unhoused population in the country and the largest number of incarcerated people.

I challenged everyone to envision a world without homelessness, hunger, or climate change. No more mass incarceration or policing as we know it. Where everyone has guaranteed quality healthcare and education. Peace at home and in the world. I used the electoral arena to elevate the consciousness for these social and economic justice issues—to imagine bigger, create more, and realize deeper.

DG: You identify as a Xicanx writer. There’s a lot that goes into the term and every writer brings their own unique elements to the aforementioned identity to make an all-encompassing definition of the term impossible. What does it mean for you to be a Xicanx writer and where does that idea fit along the Anzalduan conception of the “borderland” identity?

LJR: Xicanx or Chicanx or Chicanos/as are terms of resistance. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s gave us permission to name ourselves. The word Chicano comes from “Mexicano” (mesh-i-cano) with emphasis on our Indigenous roots. Mexicas, the original name of the so-called Aztecs, also gave Mexico its name. The misnomer “Aztec” came from “Aztlan” the mythical homeland of the Mexicas, which is believed to be in the U.S. Southwest. Xicanx people are related to the Shoshone, Ute, Chumash, O’dham, Tongva/Kish, and other original peoples here before the Spanish or the Mexican state or the United States.

In the 1960s, most Chicanos didn’t know the actual traditions and cosmologies. But over the decades, me and others went to Indigenous teachers to learn. More than thirty years ago, I found Mexica elders such as Tlacaelel of Mexico and Macuiltochli of Chicago; Ed Featherman and others among the Lakota in Pine Ridge Reservation; and various Mexica teachers in Los Angeles. A Diné “Roadman” Anthony Lee and his wife Delores also adopted my wife Trini in 1998 on the Navajo Reservation of Arizona, where we’ve gone most years since then for ceremonies. In 1995, I visited the Sierra Tarahumara in Chihuahua, Mexico where my mother’s Rarámuri Indigenous roots originate. As Xicanx, I carry many layers—from the deepest tied to all Native peoples on this continent, to the Spanish, to Mexico as a country, to the United States. All are me. I’m all of them.

DG: In an interview with Chapter House Journal you spoke about experiences of listening to poetry in languages you couldn’t understand, yet still being moved by the pieces just by the act of hearing them. Are there concepts, ideas, feelings, or emotions you express easily in Spanish that don’t come across well in English and what do you do when that happens? Communicate these things, anyways, in Spanish and trust that the reader will find their way to the meaning?

LJR: The difference in languages is mostly in tone and sound. I learned this when I began to translate my English poems to Spanish. When I tried to do poems first in Spanish, they just felt different. I’ve had other translators, and Trini, who is formally trained in Spanish, unlike me, has helped me tremendously.

In 2023, Chicanx Sin Fronteras published my first bilingual poetry book in Mexico City (“Todos los caminos llevan a casa/All Roads Lead Home”). They had a team of translators work on the poems Trini and I hadn’t translated. Spanish is more rhythmic, forcing English to find meter, rhyme, and other devices to keep its music. English can become quite artful because of this.

I remember once using poetry in a drug cartel prison in Chihuahua to stop the incarcerated men from possibly kidnapping me and a warden (who had just walked in—the first time he’d ever set foot inside the prison walls). My words rang out: Pedazo a pedazo / te desgarran: / pelandote capas de tu ser, / mintiendo sobre quién eres, / hablando por tus sueños, … on and on. The rhythm and force of my voice distracted the prisoners enough so the warden could leave. Soon the men calmed down, sat, and finally we had a good time. The impact of spoken word in poetry can do that. In this case, this may have saved some lives.

DG: Close to forty years ago, you founded Tia Chucha Press, which has become one of the most successful small publishers in the nation. What inspired you to take this road and which challenges have you faced in keeping the institution running?

LJR: In the late 1980s, I had a hard time getting my poetry published. I had some magazines accept my work, but publishers kept rejecting me even though I studied the markets and sent my work to prominent publishing houses—like thousands of other poets. So, with help of a grant, and two poets I respected who looked over my manuscript, I published my first book, a 19-poem collection called “Poems across the Pavement.” At the time I worked as a typesetter for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s publishing house. The designer there, Jane Brunette of Menominee/French/German descent, worked on the cover and interior pages. She’s been Tia Chucha Press’ designer ever since!

With the manager’s permission, I used the company’s equipment after hours to typeset the book. I came up with the name Tia Chucha Press to release it—honoring my favorite aunt who was an independent creative woman in Mexico when such women were cruelly dismissed and diminished. The book was beautifully done. I sold it out of the trunk of my car after I read in bars, libraries, cafes, and other venues in Chicago when Poetry Slams were exploding everywhere. Chicago poets came up to me and asked if I could do their books. I took this and ran, publishing the best of the Slam movement, then expanding to other kinds of poetry from around the country. More grants helped as well as becoming the publishing wing of the non-profit Guild Complex, a major literary arts organization. Soon after Northwestern University Press became our distributor.

After moving to the northeast San Fernando Valley, Trini and I founded in 2001 Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore. We shaped this space from the examples and energies of the East Los Angeles and Chicago arts-and-literary scenes. In 2005, Tia Chucha Press became the center’s publishing wing. We’ve had strong emerging writers, but also veteran authors. After being first published with Tia Chucha Press, many of our writers went on to win National Book Awards, Kingsley Tufts Book Awards, Jackson Literary Awards, Whiting Fellowships, Lannan Fellowships, Poet Laureate designations, and finalists for the Pulitzer’s and National Book Critics Circle awards. One became President Obama’s inaugural poet. We’ve had wonderful anthologies, including the first U.S. published book featuring Central American writers, “The Wandering Song,” edited by Leticia Hernandez-Linares, Ruben Martinez, and Hector Tobar. We’ve now done around 120 books.

Challenges include sales—poetry is a hard “sell” in the U.S. Also, we publish mostly writers of color as well as Queer and working class. We’re “woke” and D.E.I. But we forge on—the need for such a press is great. And having a cultural center/bookstore with a press is a powerfully unique way to do what we do.

DG: Last year Tia Chucha and Red Hen decided to join forces and create a partnership. This move will consolidate arguably two of the most important LA publishers, though with their own, distinctive visions. Can you talk about what changes this will bring to both presses, what the motivation behind the alliance was, and how the differences in editorial policy complement each other?

LJR: Yes, Tia Chucha Press became a distributive line of Red Hen Press, Los Angeles’s premier publishing house. As you say, we will continue with our kinds of books, with our own editorial vision. Besides me as founding editor, Tia Chucha Press has wonderful associate editors: Bronx-raised Puerto Rican Luivette Resto and Salvadoran-born William Archila, both respected poets. Besides Red Hen Press, we are also collaborating with Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute of Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

DG: You have described Chicago as your second home. In fact, it was there that Tia Chucha Press began in 1989. How often do you go back and to what extent do you still have literary ties to the city?

LJR: When I can, I’m in Chicago two or three times a year. Ramiro and Andrea live there, as well as two of my grandkids. Another granddaughter lives in another part of Illinois (I also have a grandson in North Carolina and a granddaughter in Brooklyn). I have a total of eight great-grandchildren in the state as well. In fact, the last time I did a major presentation in Chicago—to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the TCP anthology “Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex” for the Poetry Foundation and separately for the Guild Complex—some people thought I still lived in the city because of the many public events I do there. The 18th Street Casa de Cultura in the Mexican barrio of Pilsen is Tia Chucha’s sister organization. A couple of years ago, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center featured me at a popular market along the Paseo Boricua of Humboldt Park, the heart of Chicago’s Puerto Rican neighborhood, my old neighborhood (where renowned authors Sandra Cisneros and Saul Bellow once lived). People still treat me like a native son.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

LJR: As I write this, I have two new manuscripts in the hands of my agent—a short story collection and a book on writing based on forty-five years teaching in prisons, juvenile lockups, and jails. I’m also working on film and TV scripts (I’ve been a consultant on three TV shows, including two seasons of FX’s “Snow Fall”). Last year, my “Always Running” photographs from fifty years ago were shown at Tia Chucha’s art gallery, Cal-State University, Northridge, Rio Hondo College, and several community art galleries in East Los Angeles, including Plaza de la Raza’s in Lincoln Park. This April, the distinguished Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles Community College will exhibit these photos.

Edinburgh University Press in Scotland last year published “The Life, Literature, and Legacy of Luis J. Rodriguez: The Long Run,” edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben V. Olgin, a reader with articles and poems by academics, poets, community leaders, and more (including a foreword by John Densmore of The Doors). Professors are trying to get me to England and other parts of Europe around this book. I’ve also recently been to various areas of Mexico and Guatemala as well as Vancouver Island and Havana. I still do events in cities across the United States. Traveling continues to be part and parcel of my writing, teaching, speaking, and readings.

As for books I’m presently devouring, there is Diné poet Jake Skeets’ new collection “Horses” and the nonfiction book “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands” by Kelly Lytle Hernandez.

Author Bio:

Luis J. Rodriguez is one of the United States’ best known Chicano writers. He has written 17 books of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He’s best known for the 1993 best-selling memoir Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and its sequel, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions & Healing. He served as Los Angeles Poet Laureate from 2014-2016. He’s also founding editor of Tia Chucha Press, now for 37 years, and co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore, now going on 25 years, both in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. His last poetry book in the United States was 2016’s Borrowed Bones. His last book appeared in 2020, called From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer.