Scot: Who are some of your favorite musical artists? Does music play into your writing?
Puma: I love this question because recently I have been working on a series that incorporates music and the ways in which I respond to it. Not tributes to musicians, but tuning into what happens when I play music, where it takes me, may be old memories, may be propelling into the future. I was playing hardcore music at 9AM and started hating everyone and wrote a poem dedicated to an obscure French punk band called Lucrate Milk, poem title is “I Love You Fuck Off.” That sort of thing, and the ways in which music plays into the breathe and body of the piece. I would love to incorporate music more actively into performance. I saw a guy named Chuck Perkins from New Orleans and loved what he does, as well as some of my friends who perform, like Cyndi Dawson and Jackie Sheeler. As far as my favorite artists…too many but recently, in utilizing music as inspiration I swing from hard core, punk, to jazz. One day the poem came from Iggy Pop, the next day from Lee Morgan. My favorite piece of music will probably always be Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
Scot: What one writer/poet influenced you in the beginning of your writing? Who influences you now?
Puma: One????? Christ. OK. I will say Diane DiPrima because not only was she a Beat Goddess, the type of broad who hung out with the guys, fucked who she wanted, and started printing presses in the early 60′s or something, she started out as a little Italian girl from Brooklyn in a neighborhood not unlike mine. I missed the Beat Generation and was growing up in Bensonhurst in a culture where you hung out in front of the candy store and cut school and smoked cigarettes in the projects so finding Dinners and Nightmares and, later, Revolutionary Letters, was a life-saver. Influences now? Depends on the day. I go back always to certain favorite, poets like Neruda and ee cummings for inspiration. I am really lucky to attend a wonderful poetry workshop facilitated by different poets every week, so I would say I have new and fresh inspiration every Sunday, 12-2, in the Bronx. Ascentos Writing Workshop is awesome.
Scot: Back in the 70s I had a teacher introduce me to Brautigan that changed the way I looked and wrote poetry—did you have any experiences like that?
Puma: I never had a good teacher in my life. In Lafayette HS in Brooklyn, we did not get that cool guy with the beard who played Dylan (later, I guess it would be hip-hop.) However, in the late 70′s, I was living on east 7th Street, around the corner from where the Nuyorican Poets Cafe originally opened. I was there the second night and probably almost every night for years. This was the first time I knew that poetry was not a privilege for the elite, that kids could come off the street, pick up a pen, and get on a stage, and lives could change, people could be heard. And everyone came through there. One of my favorite memories is William Burroughs getting booed off the stage cause nobody understood what he was talking about. I think he came back later though.
Scot: Trendsetter or Johnny- Come-Lately?
Puma: Too damn old to be Johnny-Come-Lately tho I was off the track for many years, gathering information so that I could write poems about the most fucked up people in the world, semi-autobiographical of course.
Scot: Your pick for top female poet of all time?
Puma: Another crazy question. There is not just one but if I had to pick one or die I’d pick Nikki Giovanni because of the way she makes you feel loved and brings you inside the poem so that you imagine that you feel just what she did when writing it. But there are so many, fuck picking one. I love Patti Smith and Janis Joplin and Sonya Sanchez and Lucinda Williams and all the girls who write.
Scot: Tell me a dream?
Puma: Sleeping long enough to have one is a dream of mine.
Scot: What is up next?
Puma: I’m excited that I’ve been asked to feature at the closing night of the Riverwood Poetry Festival, also known as the Beat Poetry Festival in Middleton Ct in June and that the theme of the reading is Outlaw Night and it’s at 10 PM at a bar called the Gatekeeper, which they tell me is a biker bar so I figure everyone, especially the poets, will be so damn drunk by the time I go on I’ll have free reign to do whatever I want.
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