Interview
A Dance of Disciplines:
an Interview with Dimitri Reyes
BY Adam Buckley, Dimitrius A. DeMarco, Desirae Mack, & Samantha Szumloz
March 2026
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Language, in its most primordial form, is and has always been a paradox. There are words and phrases that have journeyed from language to language, sentence to sentence, and mouth to mouth. As a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist, author, poet, and educator, Dimitri Reyes shares the complexities of culture, community, pedagogy, and the dual address and delivers by carrier pigeon the intricacies, dichotomies, contradictions, and interwoven idiosyncrasies of history, myth, regionality, and identity in his poetry collection Papi Pichón.
In this interview with Glassworks, Dimitri Reyes pulls back the curtain–or more accurately, the tapestry–on the diasporic experience, and his work towards bridging the gap. |
Glassworks Magazine (GM): You describe Papi Pichón in its blurb as an “ars poetica response” to a paradox born of a kind of discography of words and phrases being given the blanket title of “Puerto Rican.” Why did you choose to highlight this issue in particular, and what was the meaning behind describing it as “myth?”
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Dimitri Reyes (DR): If we get into the socioethnic studies of colonialism itself, it gets messy and nuanced, so much so that there are entire courses and fields of study on this topic! Poetry, storytelling, and spoken word were ways that I could both learn about myself while sharing information with others to educate. In the foreword of Papi Pichón, poet and scholar Vincent Toro brings up the concept of “ni de aqui, ni de alla” (neither here nor there) to illustrate the colonial situation of Puerto Ricans that is central to the book.
For those who are unfamiliar, Puerto Rico, though not an official state, is a commonwealth of the United States, where even though it functions as its own island, the many financial, governmental, and import/export frameworks make it so that Puerto Rico must geopolitically rely on the United States. |
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Currently, there are 3.3 million living in Puerto Rico who love, struggle, and live life on the island, literally an Atlantic Ocean away from the United States. In the United States, there are nearly 6 million Puerto Ricans across all 50 states who love and struggle in urban, suburban, and rural communities where they live “American” lives that contrast island living. Hence, the need to use poetry, storytelling, and spoken word to explain the “neither-here-nor-there”-ness of Puerto Rican people who have their own nationhood, but are arguably and inherently American, no matter where they are residing.
Regionality isn’t the only obscurity that makes the Puerto Rican identity complex difficult, but when we think about cultural & ethnicity markers, it makes it more complicated. We all look so different! The ways in which Puerto Ricans choose to identify with their Indigenous, African, or European ancestry adds an extra level of complexity.
Now, in terms of myth, there is a differentiation between Papi Pichón, the book, and Papi Pichón, the speaker within the book. When I call Papi Pichón a myth, the first question becomes, “Is the entire collection a myth or is the character itself mythological?” It’s interesting that you chose to ask me to highlight the complexities of “Puerto Rican” and the mythology of Papi Pichón in the same breath.
Regionality isn’t the only obscurity that makes the Puerto Rican identity complex difficult, but when we think about cultural & ethnicity markers, it makes it more complicated. We all look so different! The ways in which Puerto Ricans choose to identify with their Indigenous, African, or European ancestry adds an extra level of complexity.
Now, in terms of myth, there is a differentiation between Papi Pichón, the book, and Papi Pichón, the speaker within the book. When I call Papi Pichón a myth, the first question becomes, “Is the entire collection a myth or is the character itself mythological?” It’s interesting that you chose to ask me to highlight the complexities of “Puerto Rican” and the mythology of Papi Pichón in the same breath.
"My true hope is that readers recognize that there is a Papi Pichón in all of us—a multitude of different identifying feathers that create the bird of us." |
I’d hope that an interpretation of the collection is that, in itself, Papi Pichón is the essence of Puerto Rican—the amalgamation of many cultures and places. Aren’t we all of many cultures or, at least, traditions and places? My true hope is that readers recognize that there is a Papi Pichón in all of us—a multitude of different identifying feathers that create the bird of us.
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GM: In continuing with metaphor, you use Papi Pichón as an extended metaphor that flies through the book and into various poems such as “Papi Pichón’s Origin Story: Version 1,” “Papi Pichón Shadowboxes With His Legacy,” and so many more. Papi Pichón seemingly acts sometimes as a participant and other times as an observer. Vincent Toro, in the foreword, describes him as a “counter hero.” What is his (or your) objective in letting Papi Pichón be that presence?
DR: Papi Pichón isn’t a complicated addition to our collective lore. He takes a bit from Hermes and plays messenger. He's also the ghost of Christmas past to show us our different potential, and the Anancy spider when he decides to intervene as a carrier pigeon—a guide. The fact that Papi Pichón can exist in the present, flying from Puerto Rico, to the United States, and back again while traveling through time periods from poem to poem, allows the reader to get a bird’s-eye view of critical moments in personal and political histories.
As a craft technique, a mythological being allowed me to access personal stories from my life and my grandfather’s life in order to get two separate generational POV’s of Puerto Rican identity. Simultaneously, it gave me permission to widen my narrative scope and have Papi Pichón travel to the past and future. I could then write closer to key moments throughout history, whether it was when the Spanish first landed in the Caribbean, or what sparked the lesser-known Puerto Rican riots in 1974 that led to national Latinx organizations like Aspira Inc.
DR: Papi Pichón isn’t a complicated addition to our collective lore. He takes a bit from Hermes and plays messenger. He's also the ghost of Christmas past to show us our different potential, and the Anancy spider when he decides to intervene as a carrier pigeon—a guide. The fact that Papi Pichón can exist in the present, flying from Puerto Rico, to the United States, and back again while traveling through time periods from poem to poem, allows the reader to get a bird’s-eye view of critical moments in personal and political histories.
As a craft technique, a mythological being allowed me to access personal stories from my life and my grandfather’s life in order to get two separate generational POV’s of Puerto Rican identity. Simultaneously, it gave me permission to widen my narrative scope and have Papi Pichón travel to the past and future. I could then write closer to key moments throughout history, whether it was when the Spanish first landed in the Caribbean, or what sparked the lesser-known Puerto Rican riots in 1974 that led to national Latinx organizations like Aspira Inc.
GM: Multiple layers of nuance are something that you create in the dance between the two languages present in your collection. Your poem “Papi Pichón Seeks Counsel” begins with an epigraph in Spanish, but then almost your entire poem utilizes English words and phrasing. What are some of the challenges present in weaving the two together? And paradoxically, what are the joys and richness derived that would otherwise be impossible to appreciate in the usage of one?
DR: The epigraph in “Papi Pichón Seeks Counsel” are lyrics from the song, “Aguanile” by salsa singer Héctor Lavoe, which is a word that doesn’t really exist in the Spanish language, but is a word of Yoruba origin understood as a baptism. The nuances of the Spanish language continue to interest me as someone who didn’t begin speaking it until adulthood, and discovering which words in Spanish originated from Taínos, the indigenous people of what became Puerto Rico, like canoa (canoe) and juracán (hurricane), and which words were untranslatable in an English to Spanish dictionary like aguanile or guenaga, which are both in the book.
With respect to this codification of linguistic research, when it comes to the Spanish language in this book, language becomes a metaphor of duality between Eurocentric and Indigenous/African origins, similar to the duality seen between the United States and Puerto Rico, or, as you mention, English and Spanish existing on the same page.
For anyone who is bilingual, hearing conversations and filtering experiences in several languages at once is as normal as the ways in which one would speak to authority in one manner and their friends in another. I wanted to honor that, and therefore, didn’t see myself presenting both languages together as a challenge.
GM: We appreciate how your cultural and community ties really shine through your multidisciplinary work combining slam poetry with elements such as music and dance, particularly jazz. In your process, do you develop these two mediums separately or in combination with each other? What do you think is valuable in bridging these genres together?
DR: The epigraph in “Papi Pichón Seeks Counsel” are lyrics from the song, “Aguanile” by salsa singer Héctor Lavoe, which is a word that doesn’t really exist in the Spanish language, but is a word of Yoruba origin understood as a baptism. The nuances of the Spanish language continue to interest me as someone who didn’t begin speaking it until adulthood, and discovering which words in Spanish originated from Taínos, the indigenous people of what became Puerto Rico, like canoa (canoe) and juracán (hurricane), and which words were untranslatable in an English to Spanish dictionary like aguanile or guenaga, which are both in the book.
With respect to this codification of linguistic research, when it comes to the Spanish language in this book, language becomes a metaphor of duality between Eurocentric and Indigenous/African origins, similar to the duality seen between the United States and Puerto Rico, or, as you mention, English and Spanish existing on the same page.
For anyone who is bilingual, hearing conversations and filtering experiences in several languages at once is as normal as the ways in which one would speak to authority in one manner and their friends in another. I wanted to honor that, and therefore, didn’t see myself presenting both languages together as a challenge.
GM: We appreciate how your cultural and community ties really shine through your multidisciplinary work combining slam poetry with elements such as music and dance, particularly jazz. In your process, do you develop these two mediums separately or in combination with each other? What do you think is valuable in bridging these genres together?
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DR: When I started writing seriously, I didn’t think that I’d be considered a slam poet and didn’t have a goal of calling myself an artist in multiple disciplines. Truthfully, I was stumbling over my own feet for a while trying to “find my voice” and was very insecure that I didn’t sound like my peers. It wasn’t until I leaned into my own individuality that I gave myself permission to create freely between different mediums like spoken word, singing, choreography, and music.
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"...I gave myself permission to create freely between different mediums like spoken word, singing, choreography, and music." |
I started becoming more of an active participant in the arts while I was in my undergrad at Rutgers University-Newark in 2015. The city was always bustling with art, whether it was walls of graffitied murals, cultural parades, city or school step teams, or the speakers that’d play outside corner stores and restaurants, where retirees would gather with percussion instruments and play along. This is to say, that my proximity to the arts in Newark is foundational to how I operate as an artist.
As you can imagine, it was a bit confusing as a younger poet to be learning poetry in college programs while experiencing the arts outside the realms of the literati, but it very much blended together the more I worked both muscles. It was when I studied the Nuyorican Movement, Black Arts Movement, and more broadly, Jazz poetry that I felt freer. In my body, I was already creating as a progeny of those movements. I simply had to study what had already been done, and how I could further develop my craft and add to the canon.
When I write a page of poetry, it is impossible for it to be void of the music and pacing that comes from the theatricalization of poetics and jazz composition. The reader is (hopefully) brought into the world of the poem that I made a little brighter by blending these mediums together.
GM: You are an artist who has produced work in a wide variety of mediums over your career. How does your voice—your use of sound, language, and rhythm—differ between the page and your performances? How do you implement changes from venue to venue, depending on the location and audience communities?
DR: Well, comically, in my head, I sound different than I do on a mic, whether it’s live or mixed. So there are some ways I hear myself reciting a poem in my head that I know will play out differently on stage. Musicians are my favorite kinds of artists to hang out with (sorry poets, you’re a close second!) because they live in a world of trying stuff out over and over again. So when I’m gigging heavily or have a few big performances, I practice memorizing and reading work the way musicians practice their sets for hours a day. I spend a lot more time reading and rereading my work, adding choreography, thinking about pacing and nuances in inflection.
This is where I consider what works in a large arts center or an outdoor venue versus a classroom or a bookstore. Getting there early also helps to survey the acoustics of the venue and see if there are ways I can “work the room” during sets via different places to walk and perform—like can I take the wireless mic into the audience without the signal dropping? Can I step up on this platform for more visual effect? Or if I’m in a classroom, can this desk support me if I want to get all Dead Poets Society on ‘em!
I’m conscientious of how a poem looks on the page because reading a poem to yourself offers its own experience. My job as the writer is to hold out a hand and compose the piece in a way that I intended it to be read, with the caveat that the reader will take their own liberties with the interpretation—the experience then becomes an intellectual dance, where the line breaks are the dance charts, but the reader moves at their own pace.
With this in mind, artists talk about “reading the room” where they will only read certain poems in certain communities. Once I gained complete confidence in my own work, I became a storyteller who is willing to agitate, to push those pressure points and stimulate discussion. My poems are to both entertain and educate, so I hold in my heart that poetry is for everyone.
As you can imagine, it was a bit confusing as a younger poet to be learning poetry in college programs while experiencing the arts outside the realms of the literati, but it very much blended together the more I worked both muscles. It was when I studied the Nuyorican Movement, Black Arts Movement, and more broadly, Jazz poetry that I felt freer. In my body, I was already creating as a progeny of those movements. I simply had to study what had already been done, and how I could further develop my craft and add to the canon.
When I write a page of poetry, it is impossible for it to be void of the music and pacing that comes from the theatricalization of poetics and jazz composition. The reader is (hopefully) brought into the world of the poem that I made a little brighter by blending these mediums together.
GM: You are an artist who has produced work in a wide variety of mediums over your career. How does your voice—your use of sound, language, and rhythm—differ between the page and your performances? How do you implement changes from venue to venue, depending on the location and audience communities?
DR: Well, comically, in my head, I sound different than I do on a mic, whether it’s live or mixed. So there are some ways I hear myself reciting a poem in my head that I know will play out differently on stage. Musicians are my favorite kinds of artists to hang out with (sorry poets, you’re a close second!) because they live in a world of trying stuff out over and over again. So when I’m gigging heavily or have a few big performances, I practice memorizing and reading work the way musicians practice their sets for hours a day. I spend a lot more time reading and rereading my work, adding choreography, thinking about pacing and nuances in inflection.
This is where I consider what works in a large arts center or an outdoor venue versus a classroom or a bookstore. Getting there early also helps to survey the acoustics of the venue and see if there are ways I can “work the room” during sets via different places to walk and perform—like can I take the wireless mic into the audience without the signal dropping? Can I step up on this platform for more visual effect? Or if I’m in a classroom, can this desk support me if I want to get all Dead Poets Society on ‘em!
I’m conscientious of how a poem looks on the page because reading a poem to yourself offers its own experience. My job as the writer is to hold out a hand and compose the piece in a way that I intended it to be read, with the caveat that the reader will take their own liberties with the interpretation—the experience then becomes an intellectual dance, where the line breaks are the dance charts, but the reader moves at their own pace.
With this in mind, artists talk about “reading the room” where they will only read certain poems in certain communities. Once I gained complete confidence in my own work, I became a storyteller who is willing to agitate, to push those pressure points and stimulate discussion. My poems are to both entertain and educate, so I hold in my heart that poetry is for everyone.
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GM: Your content merges poetic expression with didactism, ranging from the cultural references and education you provide in your verse, to the work present in Shadow Work for Poets, your community workshops, outreach, and social media platforms. When did your mission transition from your own expression into the current pedagogical journey you’re embarking on, and why?
DR: So many dualities! I believe that my ease in communicating and my will to educate feed the same beast called connection. This is how I’ve always connected with people. Before I got a job in publishing, I was in education and a community organizer, where I was constantly focused on community endeavors. |
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When I got into my MFA program (also at RU-Newark), I immediately created a YouTube channel to help those that didn’t get the opportunity for further poetry education. This led to doing shorter versions of my YouTube videos on Instagram, and creating a consulting business where I help people edit poems or books while giving them advice on the self or traditional publishing processes.
As mentioned earlier, when I was a newer poet, I felt like I was in a constant state of catch-up, and I turned to the internet for resources and didn’t find what I was looking for. I worked doubly hard to gain a portion of the experience I felt like my peers had and wanted to make sure others could find resources and stumble a bit less. When I was ready to publish my own work, I couldn’t pull away the teacher from the speaker, so naturally, my books also had elements of didactism.
As mentioned earlier, when I was a newer poet, I felt like I was in a constant state of catch-up, and I turned to the internet for resources and didn’t find what I was looking for. I worked doubly hard to gain a portion of the experience I felt like my peers had and wanted to make sure others could find resources and stumble a bit less. When I was ready to publish my own work, I couldn’t pull away the teacher from the speaker, so naturally, my books also had elements of didactism.
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GM: Can you describe how your work has thematically changed, or perhaps recontextualized itself, from your earlier MFA lit mag publication years, to Every First & Fifteenth, and eventually to Papi Pichón?
DR: OH! This is a fun one! At every stage, one is figuring things out, as I’m sure I'll still be figuring things out by my fifth book or tenth book. In my MFA lit mag publication years, I was trying to figure things out based off of a traditional roadmap spoken within my graduate classes. At this time, many poets in academia were skeptical of promoting or producing content via social media while side-eying self-published work. At the same time, I saw artists in many pockets throughout New Jersey finding success with social media and self-publishing. |
I was also warned to not publish early because you might put out work that you’ll cringe at later on—I didn’t listen to that advice. And ironically, they were right; I do feel bashful about some of my first publications! But the educator in me appreciates these small moments of growth, to see where I was and where I now stand. This rawness is what I learned from the open mic circuits where people would announce that their works were new to a crowd that would then exclaim, “New shit!” in response, giving the artist support as well as their space to speak new truths and try things out.
You don’t know how a poem will truly land until you read it to a crowd of people from different walks of life. This helped contextualize my first collection, Every First & Fifteenth, which was essentially a time-capsule snapshot of a young poet using their past and present experiences to make sense of their world. This was a book that was an ode to Newark and included art. I’m very proud of it, but even then, it was just scratching the surface of what I thought I could do within a book.
GM: So Papi Pichón was your chance to dive deeper into your creative process?
DR: Papi Pichón was more of a meditation and a “project book” with time put into research and building a narrative. Even so, many of these poems were written while I was philosophizing my own definition of Puerto Ricanness, continuing to recall my own experiences and writing groups of my first grandparent poems that bridged the gap between my millennial experiences to their 1950s upbringings that were NOT what my generation was sold in tv programs and cartoons growing up. This means that most of the poems needed to be organized a certain way, and I wrote about one-third of the book from scratch to sew all the loose ends together.
By this time in my writing career, I transitioned into an arts administrator and teaching artist role. In turn, I was having conversations with non-writers and new writers about poetry on a regular basis and noticed the value of having extra material like an expanded notes section and a glossary at the back of the book. While some may argue that the reader’s job is to do the hard work of the poem, I feel that there’s merit in giving the reader as much background information as possible, as if you are in the room with them. If my poem holds up, there’s still hard work that could be done on behalf of the reader.
GM: How have your themes and methods shifted as you’ve evolved with your art on your journey into becoming the artist you are now, and where do you see that journey potentially taking you?
DR: As I pen what will be a future collection, I’m as focused as ever. Yes, this is another “project book,” meaning that it’s another high-concept idea that will take time to put together. In this upcoming collection, which started with only one-third of previously written poems, I’ve gotten obsessed with the characterization of multiple characters, where everything down to their names are going to add deeper meanings to the narrative.
It’s going to be a book of poems, but will have elements of other forms of media, like theatre and film. There are references to movies like Beat Street and plays like Fences, while giving nods to some writers of my personal literary canon, like Pedro Pietri. This collection will also be building upon what worked in past books, like illustrations, the glossary, and an expanded notes section with cool additions like character sheets and maps.
I continue to obsess over different ways to make the work interactive on the page, as well as different ways I can bring my words into a room full of people. A small regional production of a future collection that includes a group reading with actors, some staging, and a score is where I see my work going in the future.
You don’t know how a poem will truly land until you read it to a crowd of people from different walks of life. This helped contextualize my first collection, Every First & Fifteenth, which was essentially a time-capsule snapshot of a young poet using their past and present experiences to make sense of their world. This was a book that was an ode to Newark and included art. I’m very proud of it, but even then, it was just scratching the surface of what I thought I could do within a book.
GM: So Papi Pichón was your chance to dive deeper into your creative process?
DR: Papi Pichón was more of a meditation and a “project book” with time put into research and building a narrative. Even so, many of these poems were written while I was philosophizing my own definition of Puerto Ricanness, continuing to recall my own experiences and writing groups of my first grandparent poems that bridged the gap between my millennial experiences to their 1950s upbringings that were NOT what my generation was sold in tv programs and cartoons growing up. This means that most of the poems needed to be organized a certain way, and I wrote about one-third of the book from scratch to sew all the loose ends together.
By this time in my writing career, I transitioned into an arts administrator and teaching artist role. In turn, I was having conversations with non-writers and new writers about poetry on a regular basis and noticed the value of having extra material like an expanded notes section and a glossary at the back of the book. While some may argue that the reader’s job is to do the hard work of the poem, I feel that there’s merit in giving the reader as much background information as possible, as if you are in the room with them. If my poem holds up, there’s still hard work that could be done on behalf of the reader.
GM: How have your themes and methods shifted as you’ve evolved with your art on your journey into becoming the artist you are now, and where do you see that journey potentially taking you?
DR: As I pen what will be a future collection, I’m as focused as ever. Yes, this is another “project book,” meaning that it’s another high-concept idea that will take time to put together. In this upcoming collection, which started with only one-third of previously written poems, I’ve gotten obsessed with the characterization of multiple characters, where everything down to their names are going to add deeper meanings to the narrative.
It’s going to be a book of poems, but will have elements of other forms of media, like theatre and film. There are references to movies like Beat Street and plays like Fences, while giving nods to some writers of my personal literary canon, like Pedro Pietri. This collection will also be building upon what worked in past books, like illustrations, the glossary, and an expanded notes section with cool additions like character sheets and maps.
I continue to obsess over different ways to make the work interactive on the page, as well as different ways I can bring my words into a room full of people. A small regional production of a future collection that includes a group reading with actors, some staging, and a score is where I see my work going in the future.
Read more about Dimitri Reyes’ work on his website
and follow him on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
and follow him on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
