Interviews
I grew up in a very traditional, Latino Catholic family. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. Despite this, we were not "strict" Catholics. We went to church on Sundays, etc, but our faith was more of a backdrop to our family life rather than a focal point.
I grew up in a town that was predominately Irish Catholic, yet I was raised Protestant, Congregationalist. I went to church until I decided I didn't want to go anymore, which was when I was about eight. I liked that we got new shoes on Easter, but being in the shadow of a dominant religion put me in the role of the outsider, which is probably best for an artist.
I attended an Episcopal preparatory school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for thirteen years. We had chapel every morning, Monday through Friday. Formally a military academy, we still had inspection on Wednesdays. Routines comforted me. While I was there, the school's religiousness dissipated, stressing an ecumenical identity that soft-pedaled any strictly Christian message.
To me, poetry is who I "am," and prose is what I "do." So I am a poet who has written a novel. That being said, I've found that having my first novel published has given me more legitimacy as a writer (by which I mean at cocktail parties, it's more impressive to say I've written and published a novel than a collection of poetry).
Once, during his office hours in Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus in 1986, Robert Pinsky said, "There are no rules." That maxim sprung to mind upon re-reading the selected excerpts above—from this our third installment of Latino/a Poetry Now. That is: these online roundtable discussions.
I wanted to mess with the term novel, to suggest a vagueness, an amateur quality. I thought of all the evocations the wordpoet has—and I wanted the word poet to be in the title too. A publisher who was going to publish the book initially but then we parted ways liked the possibility of the word poet being crossed out on the cover—because of his fear that it was not a marketable word. So when I arrived with the publisher who finally did the book I decided to affirm the word utterly was what I meant—poet in all its furriness.
I grew up in southeastern Louisiana, about 80 miles south of New Orleans, and it was almost entirely Catholic—99.5 percent Catholic. It was a very particular kind of Cajun Catholicism that I would categorize as most people being devoted to the sacraments, wanting all the rituals, from St. Joseph's Day altars to the Eucharist to baptisms, confirmations, rosaries, and novenas—everything.
Farrah Field and Jared White are poets. They're also the proprietors of Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, a store that pops up on Saturdays at the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene (and occasionally other places) to sell small-press books and chapbooks to crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes. I've heard a lot about their enterprise--the press I direct is one of the many they support--but distance avails not and I haven't yet been able to visit Berl's. So I sent them some questions, and we fell into conversation. Their answers for me are answers for all.
In December 2011, Field Press published in limited-edition 100 hand-woven copies of The Thames & Hudson Project, a poetry chapbook co-authored by Timothy Liu and Hansa Bergwall.
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Then there was Hinduism all around; in India and later when I went to Sudan, Islam. I was very moved by the idea of the god of love, Krishna, and it seemed closer to what I wanted than Jesus who hung on the cross. But the religion of my childhood, Christianity, still takes my breath away. Perhaps what I long for is a spirituality that is freed from caste and creed. What did Roethke say somewhere, "A house for wisdom, a field for revelation"
Photo of Meena Alexander by Marion Ettlinger
A first-generation American, the daughter of immigrants from tiny villages in Eastern Europe, I grew up in New York City with a strong sense of Jewish identity—kosher household, family Seders, synagogue on the High Holidays—and mixed messages about Jewish observance. Every Friday evening my mother would light the Shabbes candles, and my father would light his cigarette from the candles.
About five miles as the prompt, executive jay flies from Emily Dickinson's window, there is another essential home for poetry and creativity, a place called Flying Object. A year ago, I had the good fortune to read there, and to meet the dreamer behind it, Guy Pettit. Recently, I got back in touch with Guy to discuss the origins and ideas behind Flying Object.
Installment two of "Latino/a Poetry Now" offers readers a glimpse of how Argentina and El Salvador have left their mark in the work of two young American poets. And yet, in the end, it is the English language that plays a crucial role in these nuanced landscapes, as you'll soon read in the words of William Archila and Ruth Irupé Sanabria.
Am I a poet? I haven't written many poems lately, so perhaps I'm not actually a poet but rather an arts admin bureaucrat who had some possibly worthwhile daydreaming episodes years ago and now talks about those episodes as if he knows what he's talking about. Am I a novelist? I probably need to publish another one to be considered as such. Oh well.
While arranging the shelves for the current configuration of the store, I decided that Cormac McCarthy's books would always appear in the same place. That is to say, regardless of where the alphabet would situate them, they will always appear at eye level, on one particular shelf. Other authors' names may appear before or after McCarthy's in the common order, but because of where we are, the popularity of his titles, and the laws of marketing, McCarthy has trumped the alphabet.
Here is the scene. Mother is sitting at her end of the sofa in the study, a place she calls her "nest." I am directly across in dad's reading chair. I cannot manage to recite the verbal obfuscation of that answer to what sin is, try as I might. Mother gets so fed up with the whole exercise she throws the catechism against the wall above my head and above the big Philco we all listened to the 2nd World War on. It slaps against the paneling, slides down behind the radio, and there it stays
Despite the way mainstream books are sold, genres are, of course, porous and I'm not invested in defining or sustaining them as either writer or reader. I wanted to write in a way I had not written before: to begin with characters modeled on people, to begin with a story. I think those aims can be accommodated in poetry, but I am mostly a lyric poet and my poems aren't driven by stories or characters.
God was all around but not everywhere. My parents were not Born Again people or heavy-handed Christians. We were United Methodists. We went to Church once a week, at the standard time, and on the traditional holy day of Sunday but not in between. We were not a family who stayed in church all day, as some families in our small town did. We were in at 11 a.m. and out by 1 or 1:30 p.m.
The containing of multitudes can be ecstatic and, at times, painful. The discussion of race that emerges here illuminates distances and barriers that sadden me with (what I experience as) their familiarity. But the discussion is also deeply affirming of the fact that these poets need to be more widely read, heard, and discussed so that Eduardo encounters fewer of the narrow expectations he's writing against, and so that Aracelis' work is met with less silence or fear, and so that Rosa's work continues to dismantle the walls of "unacceptability" that keep parts of our lives hidden from each other.
--from the afterword by Maria Melendez
I began writing this novel when I was granted a long (8 week) residency at a colony. I just knew I wouldn't be able to fill my days with poems—I'm not that kind of poet—and I'd had a strong idea for the novel a few months before, and taken lots of notes, and the ideas just kept on coming, and so I thought it would be the perfect time for it. I wrote about 150 pages of what was then called Unspeakable Evil (yes!) during those weeks (and also wrote poems, and revised some, etc).
Well, I was brought up as a member of the Episcopal Church, and I attended Sunday school and church with fair regularity. We lived about seven miles from Montclair, New Jersey, where there was a very good Episcopal Church of which my mother was particularly fond. And we got there when we could. One frequent pleasant obstacle was Sunday morning tennis. I have the game of tennis all mixed up with religion. In those days it was played with great formality, and you said things like "Ready, partner? Ready?" and so on. And I can remember that on the estate where we lived, people sat in a pagoda to watch the tennis, and often there was a prayer book lying on the table next to the tennis racquets.
Poetry is pretty good at talking about the medium of poetry, can't not talk about it on some level, so I don't think I generally feel one has to leave the genre to criticize or celebrate it, but I did become interested in the novel as a vehicle for meditations on poetry, what the specific opportunities afforded by that distance might be. A major theme of the novel is the gap between Poetry with a capital "P"—the virtual possibilities of the art, the immense claims traditionally made for those possibilities—and actual poems, which to a certain extent must always betray the abstract potential of the medium the second they become merely real.
The New Salon brings writers into an intimate setting to discuss the implications of their work and craft.
What follows is a transcription of the conversation between Adam Zagajewski and Alice Quinn, on September 25, 2008 at New York University Lillian Vernon Creative Writer's House.
The New Salon brings writers into an intimate setting to discuss the implications of their work and craft.
What follows is a transcription of the conversation between Dan Chiasson and Alice Quinn, at the inaugural salon that took place on Thursday, October 18, 2007, at New York University Lillian Vernon Creative Writer's House.
When I first met Shirley Kaufman in her home in Jerusalem in the winter of 2002 we began a conversation about her move to Israel over thirty years ago in the midst of a promising poetry career. We picked up our conversation during her visit to New York this spring (2004) where she spoke about topics ranging from translation to politics, from San Francisco in the 1960s to Israeli poetry and George Oppen in Jerusalem.
I suppose, as an Indian living in the U.S., I'm used to crossing real and imaginary boundaries, and have, in fact, enjoyed a richer and crazier and more magical life precisely because I have fearlessly and fearfully crossed all sorts of those barriers. I guess I approach my poetry the same way I have approached every other thing in my life. I just don't like being told what to do. I write whatever feels and sounds right to me. At the beginning of my career, I wrote free verse with some formal influences, but I have lately been writing more formal verse with free verse influences. I don't feel the need to spend all my time living on either the free verse or the formal reservation. I want it all; hunger is my crime.
Well, I'm interested in self-expression too, but I don't like direct self-expression. And all the work that I do is some kind of invocation of or transaction with others, whether it's criticism, translation, or poetry. There are poems that are direct self-expression, but certainly, with some sense of preference, there is an enterprise which involves speaking through a mask, a persona. That's what the word means: sounding through—sonans per—and I like the idea of the mask or the masks, because I'm more interested in the dialogue of others than in merely the dialogue with another— the dialogue of the others who are out there, who are not me.
I just think about the poem. Sometimes in the past it has helped me to think about writing a letter to a close friend or an imaginary friend just to get myself into that kind of talk, into the confiding and intimate nature of that kind of talk. But I have not done that for years. I think about how the poem is communicating later when I am revising it. I might have been writing about a certain relationship, for instance, and not realized that at the time. That wouldn't be to somebody, though. I don't think consciously very much at all when I am first writing. Consciousness comes later.
The History of Literature! Ha ha! How about that! I'm interested in lyric poems. I have ways of imagining— probably all inaccurate, but all based on something that somebody with an authoritative attitude has taught me—the Origins of Language, the Origins of Poetry. I think poetry is one of the primitive forms of language. I like Suzanne Langer's idea that the original union of language is not, as poets sometimes think, with song, not with music at all, but with dance.
