In Conversation with Ricardo Maldonado, Managing Director @ the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, and Accomplished Poet in the N.Y.C.
Booklr caught up with Ricardo Maldonado, Managing Director at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center, poet extraordinaire in his own right, and gem of a man. Over drinks at KGB Bar, where writers and booze mingle lovingly, we Romanced deodorant, talked baseball, and conceded the lovable sentimentality of humans.
Our conversation dabbled and brushed around these corners:
On sentimentality vs. digitalization: “I’m uncomfortable with e-readers. I feel like an octogenarian … I guess as a writer I’m trying to find excuses not to like it … But I do like that publishers are embracing this kind of technology; poetry isn’t just for the elite, and this technology is democratizing literature and art in a wonderful way … I can’t even make up my mind about this; we’re all about to dive, and we just haven’t done it yet.”
On a love of baseball: “Baseball seems to be a sport that welcomes all these metaphors from all camps and all kinds of literature. I can think of many writers that equate writing with baseball, and they all come from different schools … I was really stunned by [baseball]—I just sit there and watch and ponder and think about the game as it has been played and my memories of the game … It feels like the romantic sublime.”
On intuitive writing: “Most of what I know about structure I’ve learned from fiction, not necessarily from poetry. But I rarely write prose, although I would love to. At this point I’m learning how things should unfold on the page—learning how to cultivate a sense of intuition or feeling towards [prose].”
For the full discourse, and the premiere of a new poem “My Book Report on Deodorant“…
