Murguía came to San Francisco from Los Angeles in the early 1970s and never left. His career has been a constant reworking of the themes of language, tradition, poetry, violence, and romantic love in the Latino community. His poems are intense and direct, the economy of their language allowing various first-person narrators to express themselves in gorgeous vernacular. When he was bestowed the title of Poet Laureate of San Francisco this year, one of his first thoughts was, “Does it come with free parking?”
1. What is your favorite book?- Whichever happens to be the current book/s I’m reading or just read. Here’s one: Almost Never by Daniel Sada—a convoluted, crazy, mad story about frustrated sex and other things only a Mexican could tell.
- 2. Who is your favorite writer?
- See above. But you can never go wrong with Juan Rulfo.
- 3. If the answers to 1 & 2 are different, why?
- I’m nothing but contradictions.
- 4. How old were you when you were first published?
- 19. A poem in a college newspaper. But I had been writing steadily for four years by then.
- 5. What writing style do you most abhor?
- Romance novels—the ones with lots of heavy breathing and moaning and thrusting during sex.
- 6. What is your favorite writing cliché?
- Suddenly…
- 7. What is your favorite word?
- For a long time it was culumuco—but my tastes have changed.
- 8. When and how do you write? (typewriter, Mac, in a café, for four hours each morning, etc?)
- By long hand if it is poetry and late at night. Other times, especially if it is prose, it will be in the morning and could be on a computer, an old Dell left over from the last century.
- 9. What is your greatest fear when you first turn in a manuscript?
- That no one will read it?
- 10. In what era do you wish you’d been born?
- This one is good enough.
- 11. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
- Anyway…
- 12. Which talent would you most like to have?
- Be a singer of boleros, if not that—tangos, or flamenco—or maybe in reverse order.
- 13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
- Poet Laureate of San Francisco isn’t too bad at the moment.
- 14. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
- Gnossos Pappadopoulis—the classic hip anti-hero of Richard Farina’s novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.
- 15. How would you like to die?
- What kind of question is that?
