An interview with the Ithaca Times:
Q. From what I've read, your verse seems to formally run the
gamut--from the more stylized verse of "The Prelude" to the haunting
prose poetry of the works published in miPOesias. Tell me a little
bit about how you personally define your style. How do you combine
both old and new forms?
I think what must look like a big formal playground (lots of swings) between the poems in The Keepsake Storm and my more recent work isn’t really a fixation with form but a vexation with narrative, both in the way that Wordsworth understood it and in the way I experienced it at home among the storytellers in my family. Absolutely, form interests me. In the way that architecture, billboards, shoes, photo frames, and chairs do. To my mind formal concerns are largely spatial. They appeal to the eye, they are palpable, material. And I think I expect them to offer a lot of freedom of choice, though of course they are ultimately selective as well as reflexive. But as such, they seem to me transparently and self-consciously constructed too, in art, in politics, in living rooms—almost necessarily so—and while they reflect the great stakes of a culture or an artist’s personal anxieties, forms are inherently, often thankfully, revisable. They are even dismissible: one for another.
The problem with narrative though, both as story and as history, is that it is so quickly confuted with form—maybe because it is so urgently forced into form. But before it ever takes on contingency, event, temporality, or setting, narrative appeals to the “I,” to the existential, to the integral. Something in it wants to be true. So the writing of that first collection of poems eventually led to my frustration with narrative conventions inasmuch as narrative, as form, once set into motion, seduces with its apparent inevitability at the same time that it forms its hierarchies, the impressive monuments of its landscapes. It privileges, it erases: one history over another. And often for no good reason.
It’s nothing new to hold history suspect. All things being equal, of course, narrative is an impossibility, but stories and histories are dreams we hold very close, which means that the most pressing questions surrounding narrative writing are ethical. And which also means that it’s convenient but really not okay to elide narratives wherever or however they are wanting. I hear that complaint in the student workshops sometimes: “his poems are so narrative-y.” There is something of the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition (as most people tell it) in that story. To be in a position to erase story or to make story—to be in a position to form such an art—is to be in a very privileged position. So, yeah. What looks like formal range in my work actually amounts to the many attempts I’ve made to grapple with my own privilege and the importance of people’s stories.
Q. In addition to being a poet, you're also a professor and scholar
as well. How do your academic interests coincide with or influence
your poetry?
Teaching is central, partly because my research interests (I am privileged enough to work at a college that encourages me to teach what interests me) run parallel to my teaching interests. So I teach poetry writing, Romantic and Victorian literature, literary theory, Latino literature, translation work, Modern and contemporary poetry, lots of other stuff, really, given the interests of the students, too. But the subject matter isn’t nearly as important as the work the students bring to the table—and I mean here the work of people who are becoming writers and thinkers. The students remind me of my own limitations and they confront me with what I need to be thinking about. They keep me honest. I know a lot of writers would love to have whatever resources it takes to be free to write all day everyday instead of teaching or waiting tables, and I’m certainly not knocking that fantasy because I crave it sometimes too, but my writing and thinking would suffer in all that solitude. I’m too lazy to challenge myself on my own. The students are the best resource I’ve got.
Q. You keep a blog too. Do you think digital technologies/new media
have changed or shaped poetry in any way? If so how? Do you reach
new audiences with your blog?
I’m not sure my blog is any more effective at “reaching new audiences” than, say, a simple author page might be, which is hard to gauge in any case. I use the space as a writer’s notebook, a place to post photographs, morning pages, draft work, or quotations and passages from my reading. The point of keeping a public notebook, at first, was to avoid the drivel of my personal journal venting and to push myself to post something daily—not for the sake of my writing, but for the sake of my memory. As for what the Internet and the blog world have done for poetry and what poetry has done for them? They seem superbly compatible to me, much more so than fiction or creative non-fiction, where money and page length become serious issues. The online community of poets and poetry publications is vast and growing, especially in light of the fact that poetry lacks commodity value (is instead, like the Internet, a kind of repository landscape cultivated by those who work it), and the Internet is cheap. Certainly I’ve bought more books of poetry because of poetry bloggers and poetry e-zines. But I’ve also been grateful for what I’ve been able to read freely online.
Q. When you're not writing/reading/teaching, what would we be most
likely to find you doing?
These days? You’d most likely find me taking photographs or hanging out with monks in theology class or in contemplative prayer. I spend a lot of time with the Brothers of St. John, in Princeville, IL. I take a lot of pictures there too.
Q. Who are your biggest influences (poets, writers, or otherwise)?
The Bible looms up from my childhood. I memorized a lot of King James as a kid. When I was ten, I discovered Stephen King had been an English teacher, and that information helped put me on a path. King might’ve planted the seed for my great escape from Morenci, Arizona. I realized I wanted to go to college, as he did, though people in Morenci didn’t much leave to go to college. Later, Percy and Mary Shelley were really important to me. They both wrote prolifically and obsessively—and with heartbreaking skepticism—about love and poetry. And I came across them at a time when I needed to think hard about my own skepticism towards desire and art. Archie Ammons, my teacher, influenced what kind of poetry teacher I would become. Later yet, while doing my graduate work at Cornell, I met writers Helena María Viramontes and Herman Carrillo and the world of Latino writing opened up to me. It’s strange to think I had to come so far east to find it.
Q. I read that you grew up on the border of Mexico and the United
States. How do you see both countries, both cultures, working within
your verse?
I’m not sure they are working. I don’t understand the experience well enough to say. In the same way that I don’t have enough Spanish to converse with anyone but can listen in on conversations and follow along, I feel as if I’m not a full participant, not in either culture. That’s not a complaint or even a reality, but a feeling. Of loss, of silence, of awkwardness. All that recurs in my poems.
Q. On your publisher's website for "The Keepsake Storm," your book is
described as "nothing less than a celebration--and a reassessment--of
American consciousness." Interestingly, both you and Mairead, the
other poet reading Saturday, have the unique perspective of writing
poetry from both sides of America, from the inside and out. How has
this shaped you as a poet?
Probably most people in the U.S. feel as though they are straddling a boundary between a culture of origin (often more than one) and the American scene we grow up in. Maybe what is peculiar to “American consciousness” is just how alienated most of us feel in our own skins, and just how much we feel we need to explain ourselves to fit “in.” A whole lot of us experience this exile acutely, though a whole lot of us have been living with the problem and have been thinking and writing hard about how to put it to rest. But because we’re almost always forced to think and talk in terms of “identity”—who are you?—our position is almost always that of the outsider. “Latino” doesn’t even begin to say: “fourth-generation Mexican American woman from a copper mining town in Arizona.” Maybe “Chicana” is closer, but not by much. This is why stories are so important to me. Identities are generic impositions. Stories are view points. Does America have an inside? Is it a cocktail party of people drinking from their diamond goblets who all look and sound like George and Barbara Bush dolls? No. I think it’s a mythic comfort mall. We buy most of our stuff from there.
Q. Do you think of your poetry as political? If so, what political
issues/ideas in your work are most important to you?
Yes. Poverty and all the suffering that comes with poverty. To be poor is to be in a state of abuse that is unrelenting, violent, traumatizing, laborious, and perverse. When it comes to privilege and what it might do against silence and invisibility, there is always talk about skin color, gender, religion, but what a tangle they become in the context of class. There is talk of honoring difference, celebrating Otherness. I’m all for having that party—I wish we had it all the time. But “class” is not “difference.” “Class” is euphemism, is atrocity on the level of holocaust.
Q. What will you be reading next Saturday? Tell me about some of the
poems you chose and why.
I’ll be reading from a book-length sequence called Utter. The work is some kind of hybrid between lyric essay and prose poem. I’m reading it because I’m writing it right now, that’s all.
Q. Did you and Mairead, the other poet reading, know one another
before this reading? How did the reading come about?
Yes, I do know and admire Mairead and her work, mostly from afar these days, but always with awe and appreciation for all that’s savvy and bold and brilliant in her poetry. She’s the reader I want to hear. Don’t readings often come about so that people can gather, have a reunion, get to know each other better?
Q. You've spent some time in Ithaca, during your graduate years.
What, in your opinion, is the most poetic thing about Ithaca?
The sound of the loose tiles on the roof of Olin Library when you walk on them. And Reeve Parker’s critical prose.
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