Rich Villar, the Puerto Rican/Cuban author of the poetry collection "Comprehending Forever," has been waging a war with words since he was young, supported in battle by teachers and parents who saw poetry as a vital competent of a well-rounded education. Born in Edison, New Jersey and raised in nearby Patterson, Villar transitioned from a hobby writer to a "professional paper pusher" when he began to seek out a higher canon of Puerto Rican and Latino writers — a journey that would eventually place him among them.

In an interview with Latin Post, Villar spoke about his relationship with poetry, his new book, his grassroots project called Acentos, and the use of poetry as a functional device to investigate identity. Eleven years after beginning his writing career, Villar published his first book "Comprehending Forever," a crafty romantic feature that investigates expectations, love lost, and longing. The charming chronological account of a sweet romance turned sour is poignant, showcasing the "exchange of intellect and heart that happens at the beginning of a relationship."

"Comprehending Forever" is a collection that deviates from Villar's normal agenda of identity, academia, and liberation. Instead, it's a grouping of elegiac love poems that takes a "meditative turn," featuring ars poetica sessions, personal tragedy and history, Villar said.

"Some of it is archetypal, and a reckoning of what [the love interest] is, and what she is not." Villar confessed that the book was inspired by personal events and raw emotion. The narrator "believes that this relationship is indeed forever, but at the end, he has some recognition of what forever truly is to the average human being, who after all is going to die one day. There is an irony present in the idea of comprehending forever, in that, maybe you can't really comprehend what it is to be truly endless, so much as you can claim a little piece of it for yourself."

When writing, Villar said he doesn't spend a lot of time using complicated poetic forms just because he can. Iinstead, he prefers to showcase the poetic form to exact emotion and the concept of the story. His allegiance is to the story and the images that he's trying to conjure. With this book, he's able to communicate the wishful thinking, the dreaming, the language of energy and hope, and the somnambulant feeling that was present when he was in the relationship; which resonates with readers in a deep and profound way.

Villar's next work will be less "lovey dovey and a lot more political" and will focus on the life that Villar has lived as a Puerto Rican, a Cuban, and a Latino in the United States.

"I try to investigate what those terms actually mean, because the term Latino was, in some ways, kind of hoisted upon us. We didn't know what it mean until it was presented by the U.S. Census Bureau. A lot of my writing around identity focuses on the historical. How did these particular identities put us where we are — put us in the conditions that we find ourselves in as opposed to others? What are the social connections between our government policies and the then-colonies, which arguably still are colonies? I want investigate exactly what it is that makes us 'other.'"

When Villar isn't writing, he spends time working with his grassroots project, Acentos, a revolving collective that, over the years, has been a reading series, a workshop, an online journal for Latino writers, and host to a number of other projects — including an assembly of 33 Latino poets from different backgrounds and schools of poetry in NYC in 2008, and a protest reading that drew Latino, African American, and Native American writers, as well as writers from across the spectrum of consciousness. Acentos' online journal, Acentos Review, features new and veteran writers, and published an interview with the great Ana Castillo.

Fresh off of readings in Washington, D.C. and Harlem, Villar will be hosting an eight week-long summer workshop at La Casa Azul, where he will teach poetry to 15 students. Also, Villar will be reading at the Bryant Park Reading Room, in partnership with Poets and Writers, on September 9th. He'll be reading alongside T'ai Freedom Ford, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and Tung-Hui Hu.

Check out his blog, follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and find him on Poets and Writers.

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