Poems to Cure Society: Interview With Hilda Raz

Poets are cultural workers who have made the writing of poetry his or her life project, passion, vice or tool of struggle and communication. Poetry is a weapon for liberation and the poet is a person that exudes sensitivity and uses their words as instruments of exaltation for all of the most beautiful things in the world. But they are also a vindicating force for justice when things start to go wrong.

A poet’s role is to raise awareness and to make human beings more humane and understanding of the injustices people face. Perhaps the power of poetry will one day become part of the exercise of power. In books, poetry can often be seen and felt in the streets, in murals, in trees, in newspapers—wherever. Any place can remind us that poetry and poets still exist.

Hilda Raz, a writer and teacher, is a poet well-versed in raising awareness for social issues. With her work, she has inspired younger generations to create and use poetry as their best weapon. Her work is marked by important events in her life such as the transition of her son, which was documented in Trans and What Becomes You, mother-son collaborations consisting of a poetry collection and a memoir, respectively.

Raz started writing when she was just a child. Her mother put a pencil in her hand (she was and remains left-handed) and she remembers the tactile pleasure of pushing and pulling it across the paper. While drawing wasn’t her strength, the letters and words she knew were more than enough to keep her enthralled.

Despite her vast experience in writing, Raz does not believe she is in a position to judge whether her writing has matured over time or not. “I’m a critic, but of other writers’ work,” she states. She finds inspiration in the most mundane things: news, nature, direct and observed experiences, reading, the life of our bodies, human folly, cultures, change. Her students have also continued to be an inspiration: “Their lives offer me hope as they go on, each one—in the classroom and out—to engage others: new life. A continuum.”

Throughout her life, Raz has found in writing a kind of therapy, especially during tough times. She reckons it has always helped her in mysterious ways. “Something about discerning patterns through the process of writing…” In her book, Divine Honors, we are introduced to her journey with breast cancer. She describes it as a collaboration between her body and her mind to heal. The poet wrote and wrote, again in an effort to document every external and internal event; to resist conventional scripts and find her own.

With only her words, she is able to express every little detail: “The sounds of words guide me, and the line breaks and form lead my words from one to another. Sentences in tension with syntax, too.” This does not detract from the fact that some things are simply difficult to write about: “I seem to write a book of prose with a book of poetry, so I’ll have to say that Trans and What Becomes You were the most difficult books to write. I was the parent of a trans son at the same time as I was a writer documenting and processing the experience. Not easy. Aaron was very generous and patient during this time.”

What Becomes You, written by Raz and her son Aaron, who began life as a girl named Sarah, is a conversation between parent and child. When writing the poems for Trans, Raz began to understand that the experience itself belonged to Aaron, but that she still had her own unique experiences as a mother, for she raised Sarah. This was the basis of their collaboration in What Becomes You: “We had to speak to each other, try to understand each other in new and challenging ways. The book took us 10 years to write. It has been reissued this year in a new edition—with new readers’ notes—from the University of Nebraska Press (2021).”

As a woman, Raz had to fight all the way. When she became editor of the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner, she made sure that their contributors were diverse in every way she could think of. “In those days, women writers were few and far between in the quarterlies. And I was one of a very few women editors of a major journal,” she states. Many women of her generation have documented that same reality and so she struggled and worked hard to make a place for herself and for other women in the lives of her colleagues, students and other writers, as well as within the industry.

In the near future she plans to continue with poetry; she already has the better part of a new book on her computer. Aside from that, Raz would like to collaborate with her son Aaron again on a new project. “He’ll be coming to New Mexico in a couple of weeks to discuss options.  And I’m an editor: part of the editorial staff of Bosque Press here in Albuquerque and Series Editor for the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press. These editorial opportunities to bring unheard voices to new audiences make me happy.”