Judith Ortiz Cofer Quotes

I think it was a couple of years after Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize and the so-called Latino boom began. All of a sudden people said, "Hey, these guys may have something important to say."

Every great book contains matter that could be termed poetry. The Bible is a perfect example. So poetry, even if it's not what I'm doing, is my teacher.

one year I was teaching world literary masterpieces, and I was beginning to feel frustrated because everybody had a speaking part except the women. Salome was the one who, shall we say, changed the life of John the Baptist, but she didn't get to speak. Neither did Judith. And why? How did they feel? I wanted to know.

I had discovered that I needed stability more than social life. I had brains for sure and some talent in writing. These facts were a constant in my life. My skin color, my size, and my appearance were variables-things that were judged cording to my current self-image, the aesthetic values of the times, the places I was in, and the people I met. My studies, later my writing, the respect of people who saw me as an individual person they cared about, these were the criteria for my sense of self-worth that would concentrate on in my adult life.

You can call me anything you want, but don't keep me from doing anything I want.

Now, as a more mature person, I realize that keeping my Spanish was a great gift.

I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasn't it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim O'Brien and you can "feel" those deaths. O'Brien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts.

In the United States, I was considered a Puertorriqueña; on the island, I was considered a little gringita.

"Silent dancing" to me is reminiscent of the immigrant or migrant situation, where you are trying desperately to live your life fully, but you're silenced many ways because you are not seen or heard. That to me was an appropriate way to see our lives then. We were part of a silent and invisible group of people.

The myth of the Hispanic menial has been sustained by the same media phenomenon that made "Mammy" from Gone with the Wind America's idea of the black woman for generations: Maria, the housemaid or counter girl, is now indelibly etched into the national psyche. The big and the little screens have presented us with the picture of the funny Hispanic maid, mispronouncing words and cooking up a spicy storm in a shiny California kitchen.

I think that poetry, in general, after a certain point in a poet's life, has to do with the acknowledgment of mortality. And even the most joyful poems have to do with, "Yes, let's not forget that life is brief." Once I started dealing with grief in poetry, I discovered that I had found my way to poetry. I think that so many young poets are only writing about the joy of love and that sort of thing and don't understand that the great poetry, like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" and like Wordsworth's "Intimations" and "Tintern Abby," has all been a moment when the poet realizes that "this is my time to express what I have gathered in this brief life."

a prime fact of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so obviously belongs to Rita Moreno's gene pool, the Island travels with you.

I would say that poetry is my first discipline.

Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes-for example, that of the Hispanic woman as the "Hot Tamale" or sexual firebrand. It is a one-dimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated "sizzling" and "smoldering" as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America. From conversations in my house, I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto Rican women endured in factories where the "bossmen" talked to them as if sexual innuendo was all they understood, and worse, often gave them the choice of submitting to advances or being fired.

I don't write poems that address the social issues in a very overt or propaganda-driven way, but I feel every poem that I write is political because if you write and you're engaged with life, where you write about people who suffer as a result of societal problems, then in fact it is political.