SEIS
an interview series
(conducted by Luis
Lopez-Maldonado)
2:
Yesenia Montilla
LLM: Luis
Lopez-Maldonado
YM: Yesenia
Montilla
*
LLM:
In your
poem titled, “Raise,” race plays an important role in the meat of the poem. Can
you tell us a little about your own “fruit” and “root” like the ones mentioned
in part one? How do those affect your work as a poet?
YM:
Re-reading this poem, I always
find that it’s not daring enough. I wanted badly to introduce myself to the
poetry communities I service but I also wanted to get to a truth about
raise/race. A truth about upbringing and what creates us, what influences us
and how we shatter under the weight of it all. My relationship with fruit and
root or home and homeland has always been problematic, as I think it is for all
first generation sons and daughters. How do we define homeland in this place,
when we clearly are only one love-making story away from having been made in
another place? How do we reconcile the complications of whiteness with the idea
that our parents too young and too green didn’t adopt these ideals early enough
to offer us something as American as sitting in a bed at night and reading us a
bedtime story? I wanted to murk the waters a bit; I wanted to show my fears and
my reservations. I am not sure if I was successful, but I do know that my
fruit/root, my NYC, my mother dragging us to funerals, my rumba and merengue,
my maduro and toston are all me & if they reside in my body, then they
reside in my poetry.
LLM:
Another abuelita
poem! This poem is beautiful: The Patron Saint of Lost Grandmothers. What do
you think about some poets saying abuelita poems are dead, that they are
over-done and typical of the Latino/Latina poet? I mention this because I am a
fan of abuelita poems.
YM:
Abuelita poems can’t die because
abuelitas raise us. This poem in particular is about the not knowing, the gap.
If I can write a poem about the sheer black hole that is created in the absence
of an abuela, then having one, all of us being afforded one gives us the
responsibility of writing the poems. There is no greater honor I think to pay
your abuela then to write a poem about her. If it weren’t for mine, I’d
probably not be fluent in Spanish. If it weren’t for mine, I might not have
survived my childhood.
LLM:
In “La
Llorona Part I” I can’t help but to think of the famous La Llorona that we all
know from stories passed down to us by our family; the story of screams,
children, death and loneliness. Did you think of this when you wrote this poem?
Did you maybe think that some readers would have her in their minds as
they read this poem? This poem is fascinating, and by default, the symbolism of
that La Llorona character is very present.
YM:
When I wrote these poems I was
dreaming about La Llorona, the one of our childhood nightmares, and I was
wondering about her before she snapped. I was wondering what kind of mom might
she have been, and I then started imagining that my mother was La Llorona
before the real pain, right before the brink of it. What if La Llorona were my
mom, loving funerals, wailing, famous for suffering? This poem came from those
musings. When you have complicated relationships with people you love, and add
to that you’re a poet, a dreamer, the lines of myth and truth blur constantly.
That blurring is part of my creative process, and I think these poems offer an
interpretation to the pre Llorona, who she might have been before —
LLM:
Two poems
heavily deal with identity and cultural truths: Hispañiola and The
Day I Realized We Were Black. How important would you say is using one’s
historical make-up to produce work? How important is your cultural background
and how much does it nourish your poetic voice?
YM:
So when I answered the question
about the poem Raise and I said I
didn’t think I was daring enough I don’t feel that way about The Day I Realized We Were Black. In
that poem I think I risked a lot. It was one of the most painful poems to
write, and took me nearly two years to be able to read it aloud without crying.
& that is poetry, when the truth in the poem turns you so delicate that you
break, then you know you’re risking everything on the page. I can’t say that
it’s important to use historical make-up to produce work for others, I can only
speak for myself, I can’t write a poem if it’s not in some way bringing my
culture and my blackness into light. Do I write poems that don’t talk about mi
cultura or my race, of course, yes on the surface, but underneath deep down I
am engaging from a space of Afro-Latinidad and that’s my truest voice.
LLM:
“Haiku
for Iris” is one of several haikus in your collection. Can you expand on how
form plays in your poetry? Do you prefer to write via one form to another? And
do you think form can make or break a poem?
YM:
I am not a formalist. I wish I were,
I wish I could say, I am an expert sonnet or villanelle writer. I am not, but I
do like a challenge. I love ghazals and I love odes and I love haikus,
particularly because I can use them as vignettes and set a tone for the poems
that follow. I think that just like any other craft element, forms need a lot
of mastering. I don’t think I am a master haikuist (is that a word?), but I do
feel a real strong connection to them. I fell in love with poetry over fiction
or memoir because I could do a lot in a little space, and haiku’s are the
quintessential small confined space. I love poets that challenge themselves to
write in form, I don’t think any form can break a poem. I think a bad poem
breaks a poem, only that.
LLM:
Turns!
Turns can be game-changers in poetry and some poems really need them to be
successful. In “Ode To My Purple Dress” the turn at the end of the poem is
beautifully extinguished. Can you expand on that turn? And may you enlighten us
on how violence or abuse may have an important role in this poem?
YM:
My odes are less odes and more of
what I like to call odettes. They are odes that at the end make a sharp turn.
In Ode to the Dakota for instance, I
blame the building for not watching out for John Lennon and letting him die;
all this after lines upon lines of paying it reverence. I like the idea of odes
being knotty. Life is knotty, our relationship to everything, everyone is
knotty, I love cake, but it’s not good to have it every meal, every day. I love
my beloved, but sometimes I want him to leave me alone, that’s knotty. So when
I began to write about my favorite purple dress, I knew that with all its
loveliness it also reminded me of something not so lovely, violence often hides
in the beauty, beautiful things are violent, poison fruit and all that. If you
dissect something long enough, you’ll get to its extremities, its beauty and
its ugliness. I wanted to write a poem that showed the contradiction that can
reside in something as insignificant as a dress, if we can see it in that, then
we can see it in everything.
LLM:
In “On
The A Train” we read six similes in fourteen lines. The images in this poem are
rich and transformative. Can you talk to us about how you use simile and
metaphor in your poems? Is it something you have to include? Is there a
technique you have or use while creating such loaded poems? For this specific
work.
YM:
The similes and metaphors come to
me from the seeing. I was an art major in high school, we spent a lot of time
sketching drapery for instance, and in that drapery I learned to see
chiaroscuro and so I see the world and write it as such. I do this in normal
conversation, if it’s hot outside I find a way to convey that via simile. At
lunch with co-workers they always wait for me to describe what I taste, not just
say: this is good, but this is better than a first kiss. It is just part of my
world, simile, metaphors and fantasy, so it was quite easy to see all that was
in front of me on that train, and in a way I wanted to pay homage to this man
that everyone ignored or tried to ignore. While they looked away I wanted to
really see.
LLM:
Your
poems “The Funeral” and “On The Subway” seem to be placed next to each other
strategically. I see a connection. Can you, if so, elaborate on this idea? Is
there a relationship between rats, fashion, death, and love?
YM:
I am deathly afraid of rats. I am
not kidding. I am so scared that for a very long time if I had to leave for
work before 6:00 a.m. I would force my beloved to walk me to the subway and
stomp as he walked in case there were any rats, he’d scare them away. What I
seem to not be afraid of is death. I put these poems next to each other because
I found it such an oddity that I spent so much time meditating on death and
dying, and losing, and so little time on the thing that could actually
metaphorically kill me, a rat running across my feet. I wondered too about
phobias and obsessions, the rat running across these very expensive shoes in no
way is equivalent to loss of life, but our obsessions can kill us, and what
about the mark on the tie, this seemed to me symbolic to what we take with us,
as opposed to those we leave behind. Your question has me seeing the
positioning in a new light.
LLM:
“I love
the world most, so I make a decorative box of my precious womb— ” This poem is
incredibly powerful and moving: To My Co-Workers Who Said I Am Incomplete
Without A Baby. Can you expand on how the closing of this poem ties in with
the title of this collection of poems? Most readers will make this connection,
one way or another. What does this represent in relation to the world, to being
Latina, and to being a poet?
YM:
This is another poem that was all
risk. How dare I, a Latina, write about not wanting to be a mom? It is a
woman’s highest calling and yet I pretty much turn my back on it. The Pink Box
clearly is a metaphor for my womanhood, for my sexuality, for my daring spirit,
for love making, but also for pain, and for societal pressure. I can tell you
exactly what my co-workers were wearing when those words came out of their
mouths. I remember because I barely blinked, I just opened up Word and started
writing the poem. This poem I felt was an unapologetic rant, but I felt like I
had to tell them, these two men (because the co-workers who said it were men)
how I felt. It’s very dangerous, living in a society in which men believe that
they can have an opinion on a woman’s body, but also on a woman’s heart.
LLM:
Haikus!
In “Haiku at the Soho Grand” we read about Italian hips and eyes and heat; it’s
erotic and tender and I loved it. Reading all the Haikus in this collection,
has me thinking: Is a collection of Haikus something you are interested in
doing? Is this your next project? Because I would buy it! You have a way with
using few words and the haikus in this collection shine.
YM:
I never really thought about
writing a book of haikus. I love them, but I don’t know if I can temper my
spirit enough to write a whole collection of them, I have so much to say
sometimes that my words flow for pages and pages and then I have to go back and
edit edit edit. Haikus are super hard for me, that’s why I love them, but I
don’t know if I am patient enough or skilled to write a whole collection, but I
will add this to my bucket list for sure.
LLM:
Repetition
galore! In “Meditations on Beauty” you drown us with similes and on the page,
this poem looks powerful and beautiful; I could almost see each line as a title
to a poem on its own. How did this poem find its way into this collection? What
was your process like in writing such a poem? It is distinctively different
from your other works in this collection and it shows another layer to your
poetic voice. I think it’s fabulous!
YM:
I was attending a reading, I
believe it was for Best American Poetry 2014 maybe, and Major Jackson read his
poem OK Cupid that starts off “dating
a catholic is like dating a tribe/ and dating a tribe is like dating a nation.”
When I heard that poem I was like, “man I want to try that one day.” A few
weeks later I was in the Poconos on a poetry retreat and one of my poet
brothers Sean Morrissey brings up this poem again and challenges us to all
write a poem that follows this form, and so I did, and that is how Mediations on Beauty came to be. You say
that this poem is different from my other work; it is, because it’s the last
poem I wrote for the entire collection, I had evolved significantly by then.
However, it is also a poem in which I am mimicking another poet’s form and
trying to create my own voice within the confinements of this idea of simile,
after simile, after simile. I love that poem, it represents for me a moment in
time where I was evolving deeper and deeper into my poetic landscape. I hope to
thank Major Jackson in person one day.
YESENIA MONTILLA is a New York City Afro-Latina poet, translator and educator.
She is a founding member of Poets for Ayiti (Haiti) a
collective of poets from diverse backgrounds committed to the power of poetry
to transform and educate. Her poetry has appeared in the Chapbook For
the Crowns of Your Head, as well as the literary journals 5AM,
Adanna, The Wide Shore, Prairie
Schooner, Gulf Coast and others. She received her MFA from Drew University
in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow. Her first
collection, The Pink Box is published by Willow Books and was long listed for
the Pen Open Book Award in 2016. She lives in New York City where she’s working
on her second collection of poetry. She writes her best poems while her boss is
in meetings.
LUIS LOPEZ-MALDONADO is a Xican@ poeta, choreographer, and educator,
born and raised in Orange County, CA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from
the University of California Riverside, majoring in Creative Writing and Dance.
His poetry has been seen in The American Poetry Review, Cloudbank,
The Packinghouse Review, Public Pool, and Spillway, among
many others. He also earned a Master of Arts degree in Dance from Florida State
University. He is currently a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree in
Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a poetry
editorial assistant for the Notre Dame Review, and founder of the men's
writing workshop in the St. Joseph County Juvenile Justice Center; He is
co-founder and editor at The Brillantina Project. www.luislopez-maldonado.com
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