From September 1st to September 22nd I had the pleasure of reading Jose Antonio Rodriguez’s debut collection The Shallow End of Sleep (Tia Chucha Press, 2011) while at the same time conducting an on-going interview with Jose. Mexican-born Jose Antonio Rodriguez was raised in south Texas and has just received his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. *
Jose Antonio Rodriguez’s poems are unlike any I have read. I imagine that for the most part poets are comfortable with the idea of populating the page with words that will inhabit these white spaces. But Jose’s poems refuse to simply fill in white space. His poems have an oral quality to them—they beg to be heard more than being read or written. There is a feeling of discordant conversation, where speech is the beginning of acknowledging that which muffles the everyday poetry necessary for survival. Where despite the oppressive violence of poverty, where despite all that displacement, language remains and it remains with all its possibilities for transcendence. In “Between Snores and Polyester” the speaker—a small child wedge in-between bodies asleep and packed densely in a tiny bedroom—comforts his mother. He whispers: “If you body leans too far/ beyond the mattress, I will hold you./ Then I chuckle because I am small/ and you are heavy. Then I sleep, yes/ but never fall.” Here remains the tenderness of language—preventing the fall and yes, even allowing for respite, for sleep despite startling landscapes.
*
Lauro Vazquez: How does it feel to hold this first collection of poetry in your hands?
Jose Antonio Rodriguez: It's a great feeling -- exhilarating, affirming. I'm also immensely grateful to Tia Chucha Press for all their work on behalf of this collection. It's been a long journey. When I was growing up I admired writers, their talent and their dedication to producing something profoundly beautiful. I used to fantasize what it would be like to have a book published, to move the reader with my words in their hands, but until recently, I only saw it as that, a fantasy. Now the fantasy has become reality, and sometimes I can't believe my good fortune. And it's such a handsome book, isn't it? I think so, anyway.
LV: How would you categorize yourself or your work? And is this something that is of concern to you?
JAR: In general I see my work as narrative, conversational, anecdotal, and sometimes overtly emotional in a language that’s quite accessible. But I have to say, I'm not "married" to the narrative format and am very fond of the lyrical in poetry. I see myself at the beginning of a journey and I'm open to wherever it may lead me both with regard to content and style. That's part of the excitement. Also, themes of home, belonging, and marginalization are quite prevalent in my work thus far, and I'm curious to see how these themes play out in my future writing projects.
LV: It seems to me like the landscape of South Texas is a defining influence in this collection. How have these landscapes come to influence and shape your work or identity as a poet?
JAR: Most definitely an influence. It's been a life-long endeavor unpacking the ways in which that region, its culture and climate, shaped me. One of the more overt influences is the awareness of boundaries, how the geography of South Texas has mapped itself onto my identity so that I very much feel and have always felt bifurcated, never quite at one with myself, though of course I didn't always have the language to articulate it. The culture of South Texas is certainly fluid and mixed between Mexican and American, but the political boundaries are still there. The bridge with its barbed wire and police dogs looms large in my imagination because my family crossed it constantly and it never felt normal or comfortable showing identification to an armed officer to cross back to what I considered home. I feel that's why a lot of my poetry is poetry of observation.
LV: I am very much intrigued by the idea, as you mention, of the power of geography and more particularly boundaries to help shape but also to splinter a person's identity. At what age did you become cognizant of this reality?
JAR: Well, adolescence was a rough time. That's a time where the feeling of being both in and out, of belonging and not belonging was most acute, though again, I couldn't name it until much later. Whether with regard to sexual orientation, class, culture, or citizenship status, I felt like I never fully belonged in my immediate environment. For example, I was very much an overachiever in grade school and was eager for the future, very focused on the future, and that felt very American, but coming home to parents who spoke Spanish didn't feel American at all.
LV: In “Freshman Class Schedule” you begin to put words —to name and perhaps deconstruct—this feeling of bifurcation. You write of your academic success and how despite these achievements you are still stuck, still “brown:” “Brown like the Dairy Queen workers/ Brown like the drop-outs/ Brown like the juvies/ Brown like the machos.” Now this poem is a very moving depiction of that struggle, of feeling very much American but being reminded of one’s place, of one’s brownness and the shame that comes with that brownness. Would you agree that this poem and many of the poems in this collection subvert that shame and turn it into a medicinal balm for the bruises and wounds of negotiating a new identity in the U.S.? And could you comment a little on how you arrived at this?
JAR: One of the aims was to articulate shame, its sources and its power. Whether this articulation is soothing or medicinal, I'm not sure. I suppose that's up to the reader. In some of the poems it may be, in others it may be unsettling or disorienting -- all valid responses. But I do think that the articulation itself can serve as the first step toward transcending shame. Much of its distorting power, how it can warp the self, is that it necessitates silence on behalf of the wounded, it demands it in fact. So I thought, can I begin to map a way out of it by having a narrator who may not be empowered enough to take on the sources of shame but is beginning to acknowledge them, bring them to the surface, to language.
LV: Another theme in your poems is the violence of restrictive space, of a landscape of economic hardship closing in, constricting the physical spaces inhabited by the voices in some of your poems. I am very much intrigued by your use of space and voice to explore this theme of space. Particularly in poems like “Between Snores and Polyester” and “Buick with Automatic Windows.” It seems to me as if these two poems themselves echo the oppression of those landscapes by acting as physical borders, by warping their form around these voices. And yet the voices in these poems also have begun to articulate, to map away out—through language—from these restricted spaces. What is the relationship between space—the violence of not having the adequate space—and language?
JAR: One attempt was to try to communicate the link between space and self, the idea that what we come back to every day, whatever living space that may be, can influence how we see ourselves -- not only that a house in ruins in this case can be representative of a broken (or bruised) spirit, but that the specific living conditions can come to symbolize how one interacts with the world. So that the speaker who is forced to share a tiny space with so many other bodies, for example, can become the speaker who is overwhelmed by the world outside of that living space. Or a voice muffled by so many other voices and bodies can become a voice that fails to bring clarity to the speaker. Hopefully the language communicates that confusion, but also the idea that as long as the confusion is being articulated, there is the chance that language will arrive at order or stasis or a satisfying narrative.
LV: Yes, the poems read very much, as you said, like poems of observation. I found myself at times observing from some tiny crevice on a wall but also from outside, in bigger but still confusing and overwhelming landscapes. In “Like Waking Up All Over Again” you paint a landscape of laboring in onion fields that are devoid of markers: “The rows fade into each other, rush toward the sloping horizon./ The lack of markers—tress, street blocks, signs—unsettles me,/ like waking up all over again. I am terrified.” But the fields are not entirely devoid of markers aren’t they? For the speaker quickly creates new and more beautiful ones: “I tell myself that I must learn the backs of my parents,/ memorize the line of their vertebrate, the curve of their haunches,/ the gleam of their napes under the sun in all its stations/ so that I don’t lose them in the dirt rows that run away from me” Could you comment on these new markers?
JAR: Well, where other poems present the body or bodies as constricting or oppressive, this poem presents the body as a tether to safety and home, where home is family. In this sense the new markers are beauty, but I also wanted to hint at the body transformed under stoop labor -- the condition of it becoming devoid of individuality -- further complicating this sense of “loss.”
LV: One of my favorite poems was “Joe , I never write about you.” In here the speaker describes his intimate but ambivalent friendship with another boy by the name of Joe. The poem itself, the title “Joe, I never write about you” and the act of writing about this person also speak to this ambivalence. Could you say some words about this?
JAR: Certainly. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Ultimately, it's an attempt to come to terms with internalized homophobia, to overcome one other form of unbelonging. I'm not certain how successful the speaker is in overcoming it, in finally acknowledging the mistake in having shunned his friend, if he still refuses to acknowledge that he writes about him. Again, I think that's for the reader to decide. When I read the poem, I notice the rhythm of the lines -- feels more spoken to me than written -- the conflict between the word "never" and the existence of the poem. In a broader sense, I was trying to say that to speak, even if it is to negate, is the beginning of acknowledging, which carries with it the potential for transcendence.
LV: Thank you Jose. We’ve discussed how the landscapes that inhabit our world can shape the way we come to view ourselves, of the disorienting power of shame and unbelonging and how language can begin to articulate the source of power of these oppressive structures and begin to map a way out from these realities. I’d like to ask you two more questions. The first one being when did you begin writing The Shallow End of Sleep? And how did the structure and themes develop?
JAR: The bulk of the collection was written between 2007 and 2010. As for the themes, I didn't set out with a concrete idea of what I would explore. It was more upon reflection that the poems began to echo each other in certain ways, that I began to see that certain images or ideas kept coming up. As for structure, that’s a tough one to articulate; one thing I was set on was beginning with a poem set in the present and ending with one set at a crucial moment of the past to leave that resonance with the reader -- the haunting and liberating power of the resurfacing of the past.
LV: Do you have any new projects you are working on?
JAR: Yes, I'm currently working on a second poetry manuscript and a memoir -- rearranging, editing, removing, adding, all that fun stuff -- both of which I'm very excited about. I’d say more about them, but I’m superstitious when it comes to talking about projects that are still finding their form.
READ JOSE'S POEMS
"AVOCADO"
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