#WeComeFromEverything: no. 11

from Weslaco High School La Palma Yearbook, 1991

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. 

During the month of March, coalition members CantoMundo and Letras Latinas are partnering to present guest posts by CM fellows at Letras Latinas Blog that will include essays, creative non-fiction, micro reviews and dialogues between writers. This year’s theme borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” Please return to this space and enjoy all the pieces in the series, and leave comments to participate in the dialogue.

Barbara Curiel, CantoMundo

Francisco Aragón, Letras Latinas 

Correction

by Emily Pérez

You are fifteen the first time it happens and you know the power of names and renaming from your study of the Bible, from learning about slavery, from that made-for-TV movie about the witness protection program, only this is not about witnessing and you are no stranger to confusion over your name, for according to family rules—names that sound good in English and Spanish, names that do not rhyme with anything, initials that don’t spell anything, a desire to name you for someone else but not call you that name—your parents decided to call you by your middle name,  which results in a lifetime of bureaucratic nightmares including one time that you will have to sign a legal form verifying that Sarah Emily is the same as Emily and that you are both those people; your parents wanted to call you Emily but Emily Sarah would make you ESP, so now you’re Sarah E., and in doctor’s waiting rooms and on the first day of school you’ve trained yourself to answer to Sarah even though you feel at best a distant connection to her as if she is a cousin or alter ego—this will be useful to you years from now when telemarketers call and ask for her—and at school growing up on the Texas-Mexico border lots of names got mispronounced, you aren’t alone in this, the Mexican teachers would call Jaime by the Spanish HY-may instead of what she said, JAY-mee, making her blush, and in the mouth of the white emcee at football games, lovely, slender Fátima became FAT-i-ma as she aced grand jetés across the field when the dance team arrived for halftime, but this time, you are not at home, you’re on your own at age fifteen at boarding school in New Hampshire, a place as foreign to you, even worldly, even well-travelled you, as medieval Japan, and why you left home is another story but the lesson you learn today is the story that will stick, cut much deeper than what you will learn in Calculus; no, you are far from South Texas, far from the town where everyone knows you and your parents and their bi-racial marriage and your siblings and your grandmother who insists she is a citizen, which she pronounces SEE-tee-zen, and where you move easily across the segregated streets because in a patriarchal world with a Catholic order what girl doesn’t think of herself as her father’s daughter, her family as her father’s line, so now when your new math teacher in this cold, New Hampshire classroom asks you for your last name, and you say Pérez and think yourself a Mexican, and with a question mark at the end she spells P-E-T-T-I-S and her name is Spruil Kilgore, which for all you know may be common in this world of duck boots, backward caps, and last names used as first names indicating good-old-boy New England roots, and you respond, no P-E-R-E-Z, and she responds, oh, you mean PEAR-ez, thereby renaming you, and remember, this is not about witness, it’s about whiteness, this lesson you will learn today, that you are not who you say you are or think you are, that without your father, your border, without your family history in this country that predates this country, its lines in the sand, its river dividers, its Mayflower, that here and almost everywhere in this world that is suddenly a lifetime away from your small home town where you’re known, you are hers, you are theirs to pronounce, because she’s looking at you, and you are white.

Emily Pérez is the author of the poetry collection House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbook Backyard Migration Route. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Diode, Borderlands and other journals. A CantoMundo fellow, she has received funding and recognition from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and Summer Literary Seminars. She is a high school teacher in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons. 

#WeComeFromEverything: no. 6

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. 

During the month of March, coalition members CantoMundo and Letras Latinas are partnering to present guest posts by CM fellows at Letras Latinas Blog that will include essays, creative non-fiction, micro reviews and dialogues between writers. This year’s theme borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” Please return to this space and enjoy all the pieces in the series, and leave comments to participate in the dialogue.

Barbara Curiel, CantoMundo

Francisco Aragón, Letras Latinas 

The Body Doubled, The Double Exposed

in Scenters-Zapico’s “A Place to Hide the Body”

by Emily Pérez

Natalie Scenters-Zapico, The Verging Cities, Center for Literary Publishing, 2015

Like the not-quite mirror images of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, would-be doubles populate Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s debut collection The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). In “A Place to Hide the Body,” a poem that occurs almost at the center of the book, a boy is doubled: his story told directly by the narrator and also by “the film of Southwest culture” she watches in her “ninth-grade history class.” The version from the documentary is familiar to us, for we’ve seen that documentary, too: the boy is migrating illegally, signaled by his clothing—“faded polos and dress shoes two sizes // too big”—and his lack of preparation: “The documentary says he never brings / enough water.” The film casts judgment; as its viewers, so do we.

But Scenters-Zapico’s narrator gives us another, insider perspective. She knows the documentary is wrong and she contradicts it. In reference to the Polo shirts she says, “But I know he wears the same // Aéropostale shirt as my brother.” The boy is not an “other,” after all; he could be the narrator’s own kin. She further disrupts the narrative by revealing that he “climbs / Mt. Cristo Rey every spring” meaning that whatever his nationality, he returns each year to a pilgrimage site at the juncture of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, a place that speaks of connection to local culture, tradition, and religion.  By making the boy a pilgrim, Scenters-Zapico confirms that he is a traveler, but “pilgrim” is a far cry from “illegal immigrant.” He is not seeking escape; he is seeking ritual, return.

We never truly see the body of the boy in the documentary, but his double is exposed. In an arresting extended metaphor, Scenters-Zapico opens the poem by comparing the boy to a boat—as such he is a traveler for sure—but as a boat in the desert, he’s in the wrong medium, and he’s in trouble.

He’s a boat beached in the desert, turning

black at the hull. He longs for an artificial lake.

A corroded can cut his foot, which hurts more

than where he’s been shot, that gap

for his finger to fill. His blood is the bilge,

his heart the broken pump.

We do not know how he’s been shot or even where in his body is the “gap”; in fact, that seems incidental to the poem. The violence against him feels like a matter of course. The cut on his foot we can guess is a by-product of walking without shoes. His heart is “broken”—we do not know how, but the image conjures not only the mechanical failure, but also emotional despair. Not only is he beached, cut, and shot, but he’s leaking, so it seems a statement of pure naivety when the narrator says, “I think he may // be dying.” Is he not dead already? The answer is delayed by a shift to the official version—the documentary. We do not return to this real boy until the last two stanzas of the poem, in which death is assured. “When he’s dead // they’ll leave his body to the sun, an abandoned / ship in land the ocean’s left behind.” The boy’s body is wholly abandoned: left behind by whoever shot him, left behind by future travelers, left behind by readers who witness and then put aside the poem, left behind by the very ocean that once flowed in this desert.

            The story the documentary tells, the story we’ve heard time and again is the story of migration—from Ciudad Juarez and deeper south, to El Paso and further north—from one life to another, from certain poverty to possible prosperity. But Scenters-Zapico upends this story with her double vision. Is the boy a migrant or a local? On which side of the border is the desert in which he suffers? And while his real story is buried by news accounts, documentaries, and our imaginations, his true story is exposed by the poem. The boy has not migrated at all. He has not moved. He’s moored in the desert, and though we may leave him behind, his image remains, indelible. There is no hiding the body.

Emily Pérez is the author of the poetry collection House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbook Backyard Migration Route. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Diode, Borderlands and other journals. A CantoMundo fellow, she has received funding and recognition from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and Summer Literary Seminars. She is a high school teacher in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons. 

Letras Latinas Exclusive: Emily Pérez interviewed

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Across the Threshold of Emily Pérez’s

House of Sugar, House of Stone

interview by Sasha West

Poet Sasha West wrote of Emily Pérez’s first full-length poetry collection, House of Sugar, House of Stone, that Pérez “knows how to cast a spell. In this smart, brave book, she uses her honed musicality to enchant the reader while she plumbs the great domestic mysteries: How do you wed and stay a self? How do you both procreate and create? The dark forests of Grimms’ fairy tales pulse through her poems. By the time you leave the wilderness of her singing, you will have been changed. Home will never look the same again.”

The two recently had a deeper conversation about the origins of the book, the boundaries it pushes, and what comes next.

*

Your chapbook, Backyard Migration Route, examines liminalities in many ways: what it is to be both Latina and white, what it is to live on a border, what it is to belong to shifting spaces. How do you see your full-length collection, House of Sugar, House of Stone, engaging in the same territory?

The primary borders I’m exploring in this collection are the ones in families. I think you said it so well in your blurb; I want to know about the line between the self and the partner, the self and the collective. In families we make ourselves vulnerable to unknowable others—sometimes by choice and sometimes by the accident of when, where, and to whom we were born.

I am especially curious about the border between parents and children: the way their fears and secrets mingle, even if unspoken; the way their inner lives manifest in their outer worlds. In that way, this is also a conversation between the past and the present—how previous generations in a family influence the present day generation. I started the book before I was a parent, and at the time I identified closely with the children in my poems. Now that I’m a parent, my sympathies waver. My hope is that this shifting perspective gives readers multiple entry points.

Your book has an epigraph from the Brothers Grimm version of “Hansel and Gretel” and a number of poems return to the space of this story as a kind of ur-narrative of childhood, parenthood, danger, domesticity, and love. How did the space of the fairy tales guide and inform your work? What is it to write from out of the shadows of a Grimm forest?

Your question made me realize that the “shadows of a Grimm forest” are an odd vantage point for me, since a German forest is almost entirely unlike the place where I grew up, the semi-tropical Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. In fact, my family had a scrubby stand of trees in our side yard that we called “the woods,” and it wasn’t until I left Texas and encountered actual “woods” that I realized the irony in that name. So on a literal level, the Grimm forest is completely foreign, but perhaps this is what makes the Grimm forest a good choice for me on a metaphorical level.

My childhood was rich with all kinds of stories. I found tales haunting; I was both convinced and troubled by the logic and architecture of the Grimms, Anderson, Anansi, and the local folk tales of South Texas. These stories purport justice, and often “happy endings,” but it’s a dark justice, and if there’s happiness, it comes at a price.

Growing up, I had a feeling that my life needed to be “happily ever after” but this did not account for darkness or injustice. Fairy tales, especially Grimms’, captured the seeming paradox.

As an adult, “Hansel and Gretel” spoke to me especially. I originally chose it because I thought I was interested in how a girl and a boy navigated a crisis differently. Several poems into the project, I realized I was interested in the different ways people abandon each other in families.

By transcribing my own concerns onto well-known tales, I felt I could tap something both specific and universal. The stories allowed a certain kind of shorthand—there were things I did not need to explain. I felt liberated from factual autobiography; I could focus instead on the feelings.

While many of your poems come from the position of being a mother or being a wife, these poems seem less about the subject matter than they do about what kinds of speakers can say what kinds of things. Those roles become lenses through which to view the world. How does positioning the speaker in this way allow you to get at psychological material you couldn’t access in another way?

I had not thought of it that way, but you are right: these speakers are yearning to say the unsayable. When they do, however, they are not shouting from mountaintops; it’s more like they are confiding, as if there’s still danger in what they are saying.

The question of who is allowed to say what has always been a big one for me. In my father’s Mexican family, there were different rules for girls and boys. My mother’s white family prized stoicism and strength. Topics like mental illness were taboo.

If I think something is awry but nobody else acknowledges it, I feel like I’m crazy, and I felt that a lot growing up. When there were silences in my own family, tensions and undercurrents about things we could not discuss, home felt like an unsettled place.

Many teachers have told me to “write what scares me,” and what scared me was what wasn’t being said. I didn’t necessarily want to write about the secrets themselves; rather, I wanted to explore the feeling of living with secrets, the feeling of probing for or accidentally discovering knowledge that I did not want.

Your poems work against type in a beautiful way, allowing motherhood and domesticity to be complicated, vertiginous spaces. Did you have particular models in mind as you wrote these? What were you writing towards? And against?

At this point in literary history and feminism, plenty of people have written about darkness within the domestic. My early models were Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Lucille Clifton. It was a relief to read women saying the things I felt were unsayable. Later I discovered Anne Carson, Carmen Giménez Smith, Rachel Zucker, Beth Ann Fennelly, and many others. There are several excellent writers exploring the boundaries of motherhood and marriage in radical ways.

There is so much about cycles within families that I wanted to explore. I was writing towards an understanding of inheritance—what we inherit through biology, through community, and even through literature. At first I wondered what I had inherited from my family and from the stories I’d read, and now that I’m a parent and a writer, I wonder what I am passing on.

What was I writing against? I was writing against silence. I was writing against every woman’s magazine article, every mommy blog, and every princess story that packaged motherhood and marriage as pure, sweet smelling, and serene. I was writing against the erasure of darkness.

Your poems have a very rich music to them. I get the sense you’ve spent a long time honing the way that sound and rhythm play out over your lines. Who are the poets (or thinkers or artists) who have been most helpful to you as you’ve developed this aspect of your craft?

I grew up in a family of musicians, and while I am not particularly talented at any instrument, I am certain that I was influenced by listening to musicians practicing, perfecting their phrasing, repeating lines over and over until they contained the ineffable. I generate work by listening for the music that each line creates and reaching towards the sound and rhythm that comes next. The music helps me find the words, rather than the other way around. For that “ear,” I credit the musicians who practiced and continue to practice around me: Rudy, David, Ileana, and Edward Pérez, and my husband, Matt McFadden.

As for poets whose musicality defined me, my parents owned three “adult” books of poetry when I was growing up, so my early trinity was Dickinson, cummings, and Plath. Recently I’ve loved, taught, and returned repeatedly to Romey’s Order by Atsuro Riley, a wildly musical exploration of boyhood in which sound, story, and setting are inextricable.

What’s next for you? I wonder in particular: since your books thus far navigate such rich territory in gender and race identity, how do you balance engaging in the moment of your life and the moment of your country?

The national conversation that feels most pressing to me is about race. As a teacher and a parent this is always on my radar and a part of my instruction, but as a writer I have struggled with where I should enter this conversation. I am a person who looks white and experiences almost every white privilege. I cannot be a voice for “THE Mexican American” experience (not that there is a single experience). However, I’m interested in how my racial identity has shifted depending upon where I am living, and I’m interested in my own internalized racism and its origins. Growing up, even in a Spanish speaking part of the country, my education erased Latinos and elevated whiteness. It’s similar to my experience of growing up as a girl and for many years valuing boys’ voices more that girls’, even my own. It’s an immense amount to unlearn, to wriggle out from beneath. I want to explore internalized oppression in general. Perhaps I’m moving on to Gender and Race identity, part two. Based on a conversation with you a few months ago, I’ve been trying to tackle this in a lyric essay. I have no idea how long it will be. Right now it’s just a mess.

As for being in the moment vs. being a part of a larger conversation, my life is such that I am still more likely to re-read a Curious George story than to read the day’s news. My engagement in a conversation larger than the ones in my household or my work feels superficial and sporadic. For now, I will hold fast to “the personal is the political” and write what’s around me. My children are still young, and I’m still awed by their encounters with language and emotion; they still suffuse my poetry. I don’t think I can escape the influence of motherhood just yet. 

*

Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone (Center for Literary Publishing) and Backyard Migration Route (Finishing Line Press). A Canto Mundo Fellow, she has received funding and recognition from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her poems have appeared in journals including Bennington Review, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, Borderlands, and DIAGRAM. She teaches English in Denver where she lives with her husband and sons.

Sasha West’s first book of poems, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial), was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Southern Review, Callaloo, Ninth Letter, Forklift OH, Born Magazine, and Third Coast. She is a professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Letras Latinas Exclusive: Emily Pérez interviewed

-->

Across the Threshold of Emily Pérez’s

House of Sugar, House of Stone

interview by Sasha West

When poet Sasha West wrote of Emily Pérez’s first full-length poetry collection, House of Sugar, House of Stone, that Pérez “knows how to cast a spell. In this smart, brave book, she uses her honed musicality to enchant the reader while she plumbs the great domestic mysteries: How do you wed and stay a self? How do you both procreate and create? The dark forests of Grimms’ fairy tales pulse through her poems. By the time you leave the wilderness of her singing, you will have been changed. Home will never look the same again.”

The two recently had a deeper conversation about the origins of the book, the boundaries it pushes, and what comes next.

*

Your chapbook, Backyard Migration Route, examines liminalities in many ways: what it is to be both Latina and white, what it is to live on a border, what it is to belong to shifting spaces. How do you see your full-length collection, House of Sugar, House of Stone, engaging in the same territory?

The primary borders I’m exploring in this collection are the ones in families. I think you said it so well in your blurb; I want to know about the line between the self and the partner, the self and the collective. In families we make ourselves vulnerable to unknowable others—sometimes by choice and sometimes by the accident of when, where, and to whom we were born.

I am especially curious about the border between parents and children: the way their fears and secrets mingle, even if unspoken; the way their inner lives manifest in their outer worlds. In that way, this is also a conversation between the past and the present—how previous generations in a family influence the present day generation. I started the book before I was a parent, and at the time I identified closely with the children in my poems. Now that I’m a parent, my sympathies waver. My hope is that this shifting perspective gives readers multiple entry points.

Your book has an epigraph from the Brothers Grimm version of “Hansel and Gretel” and a number of poems return to the space of this story as a kind of ur-narrative of childhood, parenthood, danger, domesticity, and love. How did the space of the fairy tales guide and inform your work? What is it to write from out of the shadows of a Grimm forest?

Your question made me realize that the “shadows of a Grimm forest” are an odd vantage point for me, since a German forest is almost entirely unlike the place where I grew up, the semi-tropical Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. In fact, my family had a scrubby stand of trees in our side yard that we called “the woods,” and it wasn’t until I left Texas and encountered actual “woods” that I realized the irony in that name. So on a literal level, the Grimm forest is completely foreign, but perhaps this is what makes the Grimm forest a good choice for me on a metaphorical level.

My childhood was rich with all kinds of stories. I found tales haunting; I was both convinced and troubled by the logic and architecture of the Grimms, Anderson, Anansi, and the local folk tales of South Texas. These stories purport justice, and often “happy endings,” but it’s a dark justice, and if there’s happiness, it comes at a price.

Growing up, I had a feeling that my life needed to be “happily ever after” but this did not account for darkness or injustice. Fairy tales, especially Grimms’, captured the seeming paradox.

As an adult, “Hansel and Gretel” spoke to me especially. I originally chose it because I thought I was interested in how a girl and a boy navigated a crisis differently. Several poems into the project, I realized I was interested in the different ways people abandon each other in families.

By transcribing my own concerns onto well-known tales, I felt I could tap something both specific and universal. The stories allowed a certain kind of shorthand—there were things I did not need to explain. I felt liberated from factual autobiography; I could focus instead on the feelings.

While many of your poems come from the position of being a mother or being a wife, these poems seem less about the subject matter than they do about what kinds of speakers can say what kinds of things. Those roles become lenses through which to view the world. How does positioning the speaker in this way allow you to get at psychological material you couldn’t access in another way?

I had not thought of it that way, but you are right: these speakers are yearning to say the unsayable. When they do, however, they are not shouting from mountaintops; it’s more like they are confiding, as if there’s still danger in what they are saying.

The question of who is allowed to say what has always been a big one for me. In my father’s Mexican family, there were different rules for girls and boys. My mother’s white family prized stoicism and strength. Topics like mental illness were taboo.

If I think something is awry but nobody else acknowledges it, I feel like I’m crazy, and I felt that a lot growing up. When there were silences in my own family, tensions and undercurrents about things we could not discuss, home felt like an unsettled place.

Many teachers have told me to “write what scares me,” and what scared me was what wasn’t being said. I didn’t necessarily want to write about the secrets themselves; rather, I wanted to explore the feeling of living with secrets, the feeling of probing for or accidentally discovering knowledge that I did not want.

Your poems work against type in a beautiful way, allowing motherhood and domesticity to be complicated, vertiginous spaces. Did you have particular models in mind as you wrote these? What were you writing towards? And against?

At this point in literary history and feminism, plenty of people have written about darkness within the domestic. My early models were Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Lucille Clifton. It was a relief to read women saying the things I felt were unsayable. Later I discovered Anne Carson, Carmen Giménez Smith, Rachel Zucker, Beth Ann Fennelly, and many others. There are several excellent writers exploring the boundaries of motherhood and marriage in radical ways.

There is so much about cycles within families that I wanted to explore. I was writing towards an understanding of inheritance—what we inherit through biology, through community, and even through literature. At first I wondered what I had inherited from my family and from the stories I’d read, and now that I’m a parent and a writer, I wonder what I am passing on.

What was I writing against? I was writing against silence. I was writing against every woman’s magazine article, every mommy blog, and every princess story that packaged motherhood and marriage as pure, sweet smelling, and serene. I was writing against the erasure of darkness.

Your poems have a very rich music to them. I get the sense you’ve spent a long time honing the way that sound and rhythm play out over your lines. Who are the poets (or thinkers or artists) who have been most helpful to you as you’ve developed this aspect of your craft?

I grew up in a family of musicians, and while I am not particularly talented at any instrument, I am certain that I was influenced by listening to musicians practicing, perfecting their phrasing, repeating lines over and over until they contained the ineffable. I generate work by listening for the music that each line creates and reaching towards the sound and rhythm that comes next. The music helps me find the words, rather than the other way around. For that “ear,” I credit the musicians who practiced and continue to practice around me: Rudy, David, Ileana, and Edward Pérez, and my husband, Matt McFadden.

As for poets whose musicality defined me, my parents owned three “adult” books of poetry when I was growing up, so my early trinity was Dickinson, cummings, and Plath. Recently I’ve loved, taught, and returned repeatedly to Romey’s Order by Atsuro Riley, a wildly musical exploration of boyhood in which sound, story, and setting are inextricable.

What’s next for you? I wonder in particular: since your books thus far navigate such rich territory in gender and race identity, how do you balance engaging in the moment of your life and the moment of your country?

The national conversation that feels most pressing to me is about race. As a teacher and a parent this is always on my radar and a part of my instruction, but as a writer I have struggled with where I should enter this conversation. I am a person who looks white and experiences almost every white privilege. I cannot be a voice for “THE Mexican American” experience (not that there is a single experience). However, I’m interested in how my racial identity has shifted depending upon where I am living, and I’m interested in my own internalized racism and its origins. Growing up, even in a Spanish speaking part of the country, my education erased Latinos and elevated whiteness. It’s similar to my experience of growing up as a girl and for many years valuing boys’ voices more that girls’, even my own. It’s an immense amount to unlearn, to wriggle out from beneath. I want to explore internalized oppression in general. Perhaps I’m moving on to Gender and Race identity, part two. Based on a conversation with you a few months ago, I’ve been trying to tackle this in a lyric essay. I have no idea how long it will be. Right now it’s just a mess.

As for being in the moment vs. being a part of a larger conversation, my life is such that I am still more likely to re-read a Curious George story than to read the day’s news. My engagement in a conversation larger than the ones in my household or my work feels superficial and sporadic. For now, I will hold fast to “the personal is the political” and write what’s around me. My children are still young, and I’m still awed by their encounters with language and emotion; they still suffuse my poetry. I don’t think I can escape the influence of motherhood just yet. 

*

Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone (Center for Literary Publishing) and Backyard Migration Route (Finishing Line Press). A Canto Mundo Fellow, she has received funding and recognition from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her poems have appeared in journals including Bennington Review, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, Borderlands, and DIAGRAM. She teaches English in Denver where she lives with her husband and sons.

Sasha West’s first book of poems, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial), was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including: The Southern Review, Callaloo, Ninth Letter, Forklift OH, Born Magazine, and Third Coast. She is a professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Emma Trelles interviews Emily Pérez

Please welcome Emma Trelles to LETRAS LATINAS BLOG. That is, readers will be able to enjoy her literary journalism as she begins to contribute occasional, hopefully semi-regular pieces to this space. The subject of her first contribution, in this case an interview, is the poet-critic Emily Pérez.

*

Emily Pérez grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in English and earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and worked as a writer in residence with Writers in the Schools. A scholarship recipient of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, she has also been a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her book reviews have appeared in Latino Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Gulf Coast, and her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Borderlands, The Laurel Review, DIAGRAM, and other journals. Her manuscript was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize as well as a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard and Zone 3 prizes.

In 2011, her chapbook, Backyard Migration Route, was released by Finishing Line Press. She teaches English, poetry, and gender studies in Seattle where she lives with her husband and son. In this interview, conducted over the phone one afternoon last December, Pérez talks about the serendipity of publication, unintentional passing, Elizabeth Bishop, podcasts, and how fairytales are helping to shape her newest manuscript.

                                                                        —Emma Trelles

ET: This is your first collection of poems, and I'm wondering why you decided to publish a chapbook instead of holding off for a full-length collection of poems. I am enamored with the chapbook for a lot of reasons: it feels more like a unexpected find than a longer collection, a more personal artifact, as if there is less separating the reader from the writer. Chapbooks are also often little works of art, as yours is with its slim green ribbon and photo-collage cover. Did this medium's particular sense of intimacy and visual impact inform your decision to publish in it? Were there other factors?

EP: It's a little bit of the chicken and the egg. I'd been trying to get my manuscript published to varying degrees of not quite success. I thought I needed to take a break and do something different, try something else and go back to the manuscript later. Around the same time I made that decision I connected with a colleague who makes handmade books. She usually makes blank books but was getting tired of it. She asked me to give her some poems to put in a book.  It was before Christmas one year and I thought ‘Great, I can give one to my parents maybe a few other people.’ It really was this idea of an intimate production - there was only going to be about 10 books. I had these long poems that were originally in my manuscript but no longer were, and I knew they would never be published in a magazine because they were too long. So I thought, ‘Why not put them all together and give them to her?’ I did that, and it was about 30 plus pages. Then, I realized, ‘Hey, this is a chapbook!’

I could only see how the poems would work after they had taken that shape. And I sent it out to see what would happen, essentially, at a friend's prompting, who is not in the poetry world but in the book arts world. A book artist pointed me in the direction of the chapbook.

ET: That really speaks to the importance of creation and artistry above marketing and placement. There's a real sense of purity in that.

EP: Right; I certainly did not have the marketing in mind when I started this. It was going to be a one-off piece. I sent the chapbook to two places and it got picked up. I sent it out never really expecting it to be published; I really didn't think it through about what would happen if it was selected. I put something really intimate into the world without the thinking about it. I realized afterward that I might have made my parents overly exposed, but I didn't particularly feel that way during the process.

ET: One of the central themes of Backyard Migration Route is the contradiction between appearances and experience; you’ve focused specifically on how your heritage is interpreted by others vs. how you understand it – sometimes these perceptions overlap and other times they seem to leave you in mystery, as with the opening poem, “Heritage.”

Heritage

It bore no return address, no

vaccination tags. It smelled somewhat

like imposters, or improbability.

It grew pale in the flashlight’s beam

and would not say its name.

We soaped and scrubbed, but

it would not come clean. We requested

that it wear a robe or hat, that it fold

its hands upon its lap, feet under its seat.

And where to keep it? Too gangly for the bassinet,

too pouty for the parlor. We pressed it

like a flower but the book kept flapping

open. We expected it to know a dance

or special call. It would not shimmy, shake,

or tap its skinny toes. We begged it summon others

like itself, but no one came. We patted it and told it

not to cry. We cried. We searched for numbers

we could dial. We shushed and cooed. We spoke

to it in slow, loud tones. We shut it up.

I won’t say how. We gulped it down.

It won’t go down. We speak and hear its voice.

ET: Can you explain a bit about your background and how where you come from, so to speak, reveals itself in these poems?

EP: My mother is white and my father is Mexican-American.  I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Growing up we were the only family that I knew with a mixed heritage. And it wasn't something I was very conscious of for many years. I became more conscious of it as other people made me aware of it - like schoolyard bullies and people like that. In my town there was a lot of segregation that I didn't recognize until I was older - where people lived in town, class segregation, racial segregation. My family was in this weird position of being Mexican but not totally Mexican. My dad's family has been in this area for several hundred years, but here my siblings and I didn't speak Spanish and weren't Catholic. Yet we thought of ourselves as Mexican Americans and overall we led very privileged lives compared to other people in our community.

It is the beauty of a small town was that every one knows your family - so some of these questions about who you are and what you are didn't appear, like questions about my last name. It wasn't until I left home, to boarding school in New Hampshire, where my name became an issue. I would tell people my last name and they would correct my pronunciation. I became privy to people's racism because they weren't aware of my background and made comments to me thinking I would be sympathetic to them.

ET: How did this experience impact you as a poet?

EP: It made me start thinking about how I did and didn't  fit in. I was writing poems in boarding school about typical teenage heartbreak, but it wasn't until college that I started writing more about where I was from. Then, after college, I started writing more about this cultural merge, and then thinking about the Rio Grande Valley as this amazing place of border crossing, all the different kinds of borders, the physical, the social. I wanted to start playing with this idea, and it led me into the poems in this collection. And also, it got me thinking from the very macro scale of the US/Mexico border, and from the very micro scale between a father and a daughter, how he grew up in a Spanish speaking household and I grew up in an English speaking one. We needed to make it here and the way you do it is to speak English. For my generation, it's such a loss– why didn't we speak Spanish?

ET: It's interesting to hear you speak about similar experiences as my own. Our backgrounds are regionally and ethnically different, but some of what you talk about has happened to me as well, particularly the cultural and personal politics that accompany assimilation. Do you ever feel as if you are not Latino enough for the Latinos and not American enough for the Americanos?

EP: Oh god, yes. I feel as if I'm in a constant state of unintentional passing. The whole world sees me as white, and I get all the privileges of being white for looking the way I do. If I want my heritage to be recognized I have to assert it. I have actually been very well accepted by other Latino writers in person, although I don't know what their secret thoughts are! My subject matter is not politically or socially affiliated with heritage so I think I wouldn't be your first pick for a Latina poet, but the idea of not being Latino enough is not something that I've felt from other Latino writers. Latino poets are open to what the breadth of what that means.

           

I don't feel it so much in the writing community but more in my day to day life. And I do feel it more within myself as a writer. I think this is something that all writers have - this feeling of being on the outside, looking in on things from an outsider view, not quite fitting in. A lot of that stems from my heritage, and for other writers it might come from elsewhere.

ET: Let’s turn to the craft and aesthetics in Backyard Migration Route. The four poems that comprise this chapbook feel at both casually inventive and structurally formal, the latter primarily because you have presented so much music in these stanzas - internal and end rhymes, iambs, a cadence throughout that is reminiscent of song. Do you consider yourself a formalist of sorts? Do you also play music? Was it a part of writing these poems in some way?

EP: I am not a musician, but I come from a family of musicians. My father plays several instruments and both my grandparents do as well. My older and younger brothers are jazz musicians, my husband is a musician. I've been surrounded by music in my life, although it wasn't something I was particularly successful at, even though I took piano, violin , and saxophone lessons when I was younger.

In some ways I saw the poems as little conversation pieces but also as feeling complete in themselves.  I hope that sound allows the fragments of each poem to stand alone and that the story is what pulls them together.  Perhaps the musicality was a way for me of enforcing these smaller sections as a whole, whereas sometimes in a longer poem you can trust the cohesiveness to hold it together..

I don't consider myself a formalist in the way of people who submit poems to formalist publications. The form of “Field Guide” and “My Father” are ones that I started experimenting with in college. Elizabeth Bishop has a poem, “12 O’ Clock News” - she's listing items on a desk on the left hand side of the poem in titles. On the right hand side are these blocks of texts that de-familiarize the items on the desk. I had read her poem and thought it was really interesting. In the time I've been writing poetry seriously I've written a handful of poems in that form; it especially works for longer poems.

I guess in that sense my own poems can be a  formalist pursuit but not a formalist approach, as if I'm writing a book of sonnets. But it does take collage one step further.

ET: Who were you reading while writing this book, and who are you reading now? Do you think poets should read other poets while working on their own poems. Why or why not?

EP: Definitely. Now I'm trying to read whenever  I have time to - that's the hard part, making the time. I am very drawn to musical poets. I don't know if I can say this for the blog, because it can seem shameless, but your book, for example–  I thought it was very musical. And I also love Romey’s Order by Atsuro Riley for its musicality and for its family story, ironically,  in part, about  mixed race parents and a boy growing up with both white and Japanese parents.

What I do regularly is listen to podcasts because that's something I can do while I'm taking the dog or the baby for a walk. I listen to NPR's poetry podcast and Poetry magazine's podcast. Those are great because you are often hearing the poets themselves reading their work. The musicality really comes through with the poet's own rendering of the poem.

ET:  It's also an exclusively aural experience of the poem.

EP: Exactly. If hearing a poem makes an impression on you, that's the kind of poem I want to write.

ET: You are also a book reviewer. What value do you think there is for a poet in writing reviews and articles about other writers?

EP: Tremendous value. To write a review, you have to really spend time with a book and invest in it, not just for the first read and the superficial ‘What do I like? What sits well with me?’ You really have to think about the mind of the writer, how the pieces come together. I find that immensely satisfying. It's hard work but it forces me to stay with a book for a while and really explore it. I think that we can get that kind of close reading with a book through teaching it, discussing it, or writing about it. I think as an adult no longer in a formal writing community like I was in my MFA, it's one way for me to really engage in a book.

ET: What is your next project?

EP: Getting my manuscript published! I'm sending it out. It's called “House of Sugar, House of Stone,” a book about family, again, about the anxieties around having family and abandonment within family. It starts with some poems based on the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, which turned into a very productive device. It helped with an organizational impulse within me because I felt that writing about this tale turned into a very productive exploration. Then, it launches into parenthood. The last poems in the book I wrote while I was pregnant, so there is a lot about the anxieties of motherhood and babies.

For the next manuscript, I'm exploring poems about trying things and having unexpected outcomes, cause and effect. Some of the inspiration is watching my son grow up and daily learning. I'm trying to map some of that surprise onto my own life and experiences, looking at his process and trying to see what is analogous. I'm also interested in what could have been, and I’ve started a few poems about Red Riding Hood running off with the wolf. There's always been something very satisfying to me about existing forms and the way restrictions unlock possibilities.

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Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), winner of the 2010  Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook Little Spells (GOSS183), a recommended read by the Valparaiso Poetry Review and the Montserrat Review. The recipient of a Green Eyeshade award for art criticism, she has been a featured reader at the Miami Book Fair International, the O, Miami Poetry Festival, and  the Palabra Pura reading series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Best of the Net, Verse Daily, The Rumpus, Gulf Stream, Poets and Artists,& Newsday, the Miami Herald, and Organica. A contributor to LETRAS LATINAS BLOG and the Best American Poetry blog, she is an arts writer and teaches writing and literature in South Florida.