Getting to know Rafael Arturo

How did you first get into poetry?

I got into poetry at a very young age. My first language is Spanish, and I spent some time in ESL classes. What ESL classes is, you know, it’s an educational Spanish learning course for students who grew up in households where English is not the primary language, and oftentimes, the teacher who would run that course, she would take us upstairs to the library and have us pick a book for us to read and study. One of my books that kind of just stuck with me was a book of poems by Langston Hughes. And so Langston Hughes was my introduction into poetry. I want to say around third and fourth grade.

What is your favorite thing about poetry?

I’ve come to learn that you know poetry is the initial transcriber of what the spirit feels and marinates in, which is an observation, which is in consciousness, and I feel like poetry for me is an extension of that. It’s an extension of my spirit and my consciousness. So pretty much, in the end, I am the words that I write. I am the lived experience. I am that young black man. I am that old black man. I am that. I am the culture, in a way, you know, sometimes God lets him or they or she, become my words. I feel like it’s just, it’s a spiritual thing for me.

What inspires you to write?

I’m constantly inspired by any environment that I find myself in as a storyteller, as a human, as a humanitarian. I feel like I have a responsibility to intake all the moments that life has to offer. And it can be the simplest things. Could be a simple conversation. It could be someone passing by, and it’s a single mother and her child, right? And like, what they’re wearing with, you know, the aesthetics, the whole scenario, to me, is a picture. So I feel like my pen, my words become paint and brush and canvas. There’s so much to write about when you come from, where I come from, when you live the life that I lived, all that stuff you know, keeps me motivated to write.

What inspired your latest collection?

I was working on the book about two years ago, and last year, I took the time to focus on my photography. So I was doing photography for a while, and that was my main focus all 2024 was doing photography. Then going into 2025, I basically reverted my focus back to poetry, because about two years straight, it was all about performing poetry and writing poetry. And around that time I also dropped a poetry album for people to listen to. So now I’m kind of getting back into the rhythm of doing poetry, but at some point I’m planning to intertwine the two visually, contextually, verbally, and also, just like getting back into the rhythm of poetry, what does that look like for me? It looks like watching YouTube videos of Tongo Eisen-Martin, Saul Williams, DEF Jam poetry, Black Ice. I went to the Metropolitan Museum to go look at the Superfine exhibition, and they got this little store outside of the exhibition. And there was this book. It was a small black book called Jazz Poems. When I saw that book, I was like, oh, I need that. I need that book. And it’s a bunch of poems written by jazz musicians. So you can imagine all of the musicians from back in the day writing poetry in relation to jazz. And so there were a lot of elements in my immediate surroundings of just living life that pretty much catapulted my motivation to just to just a higher level. All I needed was the signs to continue to do what it is that I love to do. So I never ignored them. I just lean right into them.