Sunday, November 13, 2016

An interview with Yesenia Montilla



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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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