$18.00 | Penguin Books | Aug 30, 2022 | 80
Pages | ISBN: 9780143137139
Laura
Villareal (LV): I never know where to begin when reviewing a poetry book. Often
I’m overwhelmed with all the exciting moves and turns of a book and want to
speak on them all at once. Let’s begin, perhaps, with initial impressions?
Alfredo
Aguilar (AA): Unsurprisingly, I found myself drawn to this book’s first section
with its descriptions and meditations on and inside of the specific landscapes
of Utah. I was struck by how place is used as somewhere to begin thinking about
the speaker’s origins, as through the course of the poems it becomes clearer
that one single origin is not only impossible, but also maybe beside the point.
Perhaps there is a kind of freedom in having multiple points of beginning as in
the end of the poem “I learn to shoot a bow,”
With two birth stories.
In one story I come from a sea god
with the forest as my mother, and in
the other, I have no mother at all
LV:
I want to come back to your point about multiple origins and discuss “I learn
to shoot a bow” a bit deeper later, but could you speak a bit more about why
you found yourself drawn to the first section’s descriptions? In the years that
I’ve known you, you’re often drawn towards mountains because it's a familiar
landscape to your upbringing in Southern California. Do you think that played a
role in why you were drawn to the first section?
While
you found yourself drawn to the landscape and locality of the book, I was drawn
toward the temporality of the poems. The mix of past, present, future,
intersecting time, and imagined time that happens as Rio Cortez invents the
future, looks towards familial history, reimagines the speaker in pre-existing
contexts, and reckons with how time influences the present.
Admittedly,
I feel that what each of us is drawn to in this book is very telling of how we
both write and think about poems.
AA:
I think that familiarity definitely played a role in my being drawn to the
first portion of the book. For me markers in the landscape, especially
mountains, have always served as a way to orient myself in the world; to tell
me where I was, how far from home. I felt a resonance in how the speaker
relates to landscape, however there is a distinct searching for how they have
arrived at where they find themselves. I’m thinking here on the poem “A Class
Distinction” and the lines,
It’s possible
I wasn’t born from mountains at all
but a valley.
What is lower
than a valley?
There
is something here about a questioning of what the speaker assumed has been a
kind of origin and wondering if that origin is located under and deeper than
where they first thought. Throughout a number of poems in the first section
there is also distinct sci-fi imagery running alongside the landscape in this
searching which makes for strange and compelling poems. How do you think about
the temporality of the book and poems in relation to Afrofuturism and
Afropioneerism that the author mentions at the front of the collection?
LV:
To best answer that, I think it’s necessary to quote Cortez herself. In the
Author’s Note, she says: “Much like the way Afrofuturism seeks to envision a
future for Black people at the intersection of imagination and science fiction,
a future that also seeks to remember the Black past, in many ways Golden Ax hopes to find its place and
definition as a work of ‘Afropioneerism’ or ‘Afrofrontierism’—terms that describe and inform my
family ancestry and experience. This work is autobiographical, but it is also a
work of imagined history.” I approach temporality with Cortez’s note in mind,
and inevitably with the work of Afrofuturists like Octavia Butler (especially
since we’ve been watching Hulu’s adaptation of Kindred) and
Tananarive
Due. The past, present, and future are inextricable from one another.
Something
else that came to mind when thinking about temporality was Dr. Alan Pelaez
Lopez’s book Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020). There’s a poem called “An
Artist Manifesto For Black &/or Indigenous Folk Surviving Empire.” In it
Dr. Pelaez Lopez writes, “I believe in the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa: we must
always go back and get that which we have lost. What we have lost as an
African-diasporic people, an Indigenous people, as queer people, as trans
people, and as undocumented people is memory.” In Golden Ax, I see Cortez reaching back to retrieve the history of
her family’s enslavement, their migration, and the life they built in Utah. The
speaker in her poems tries to make sense of her place in the world as a person
through this retrieval. Both books write towards the reclamation of history and
acknowledge what has been lost.
At
times the blur between autobiography and imagined history intersect for
Cortez’s speakers so they’re in multiple temporalities at once. There are also
poems that feel outside of time as if abandoning the constraints of past,
future, and present allow the speakers to live and create more freely. I felt
like the three sections could be read as the past, present, and future with a
few instances where time overlaps or is intertwined.
Since
you mentioned sci-fi imagery, maybe we should look at “Covered Wagon as
Spaceship” together. The sonnet begins “Standing unseen in the little bluestem,
/ curious and not quite used to living,.” The first line reads as a present
moment, but it is turned by the second that contains knowledge that feels like
it can only be gained from looking back.
A
major theme of Afrofuturism is alienation which can be seen in several poems in
this collection– a sort of unbelonging and what you’ve called searching.
“Covered Wagon as Spaceship” feels like the most explicit example. The ending
reads:
for understanding: how do you come
to be where there are no others, except
science fiction? I am a child feeling
extraterrestrial; whose history, untold,
is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction
I’m
struck by the revelation that this poem is about the speaker as a child perhaps
because child logic fascinates me– how not yet having enough information often
leads to invented solutions and conclusions like here. The final conclusion
“Anyway, it begins with abduction” is spot on though.
AA:
Since we’re touching on the Author’s Note, I wanted to mention Sadiya Hartman’s
idea of critical fabulation which deals with writing into the gaps of the
archive. As the author notes, there is so much that is lost to those whose
“histories are cut short by the design of transatlantic slavery.” I feel like
the idea of critical fabulation is in conversation with a number of the poems
in Golden Ax that write into what the
author describes as that “imagined history.” In a place where there is little
or no recorded memory, the writer takes what is left to them then imagines and
writes into those gaps. The imagination then becomes a source or tool in
finding an origin.
Yes,
the child’s perspective is so compelling in “Covered Wagon as Spaceship.”
Finding no suitable explanation for how the speaker understands how they or
their family arrived in Utah she considers “whether it's aliens / that brought
Black folks to the canyons, valley.” I think this consideration is strange,
humorous, compelling, and maybe a bit sad. Sad because the speaker can’t or
hasn’t yet found a satisfactory explanation for their being in a place they
call home, though the speaker’s roots go back generations. This speaks to both
the feeling of being alien and sense of alienation and feels related or like a
way to talk about race through the lens of science fiction, which the genre
often codes. There is also a bit of humor here too though; like the only
explanation that makes sense to this child speaker for why they are in Utah is
aliens. Of course! And while there is the very serious reading in the last line
of being stolen, it is simultaneously conveyed in a somewhat off handed tone:
“Anyway, it begins with abduction.”
LV:
I’m glad you brought up Sadiya Hartman’s idea of critical fabulation. Critical
fabulation is a powerful tool in claiming and reclaiming space in the archive.
To invoke another writer, I’m also reminded of John Keene’s Counternarratives, which utilizes
“counternarration” as a throughline in the stories. Whether a writer calls the
ongoing project that is addressing the archives failures “critical fabulation”
or “counternarration,” I’m always interested in how these approaches differ but
often have a similar goal of recovering the past to imagine the future. Cortez is doing comparable work in how she
combines pieces of the archive with speculation to illuminate various aspects
of identity, history, and freedom or lack thereof. Since I brought up John
Keene, I’m now thinking about the poems in Golden
Ax that recast existing white TV
and movies characters as Black: “Black Annie Hall,” “Black Frasier Crane,” and
“Black Mary Wilkie.” The Frasier Crane poems were particularly delightful. What
did you think of them? I really enjoyed them, but I’d love to hear your
thoughts before I speak on them further.
AA:
I found those poems particularly playful and subversive. There is a kind of gleefulness
that I felt in seeing the speaker recreating the white characters in their own
image. It's a kind of reimagining and assertion of a black identity inside that
world in which those characters and stories exist, which almost always omit
non-white characters. I found a kind of pleasure in watching how the speaker
insists on and recreates their centrality in those stories. It's playful and
sly, but also rebellious. As in “Yes, I’m going to re-imagine this white main
character in my image.” I’m thinking about lines from “Black Frasier Crane”
here:
Isn’t this the hardest
work? To be happy
when you already
have everything
In
subverting these characters and their whiteness, the speaker imagines a world
where the norm in stories about black characters and black life has them living
in material abundance, and their largest concern or work is achieving a sense
of happiness. What was your experience reading the poems?
LV:
I loved those lines in “Black Frasier Crane” you pointed out. That poem in
particular is doing a lot of work to critique, poke fun, and reimagine through
its lines and breaks. The poem’s lineation and short lines have enjambment that
turns the meaning over and over as you move into the next line; the poem is
exceptional at creating duality and critical texture. To add on where you
stopped, the poem continues as:
to have so much
you give some up
not away
but to the beast in you
that just takes
and takes until
there are no more
brûlées and no more
canapes just the mind’s
endless narration.
These
lines read to me as an indictment of capitalism and wealth. But, yes, there’s
something playful about the tone too. For instance, the choice of “brûlées” and
“canapes” confer a sense of coded class status. I could say more about class
and food but this is not the time! Let me get back to the poems.
There
are moments in Cortez’s film/TV poems that are deeply revelatory and reveal a
sort of emotional undercurrent that resonates with other poems in the book. I
was listening to the VS podcast this morning where Brittany Rogers and
Ajanaé Dawkins talk to Joy Priest. The episode is called “Joy Priest vs.
Absurdity.”
In it Joy Priest briefly talks about Afrosurrealism and her PhD work. A couple
things she said made me think of Golden
Ax. Priest says, “We’re living in white realism but it’s surreal for us…”
and then furthers her thought by saying, “Blackness is ontological surrealism
meaning like to live Black, to be Black is to live in the surreal.” This made
me think of these poems again. Though Cortez recasts these white characters as
Black, I wonder if the world around them has changed too? Annie Hall, Manhattan,
and Frasier are products of white
imagination, which often willfully excludes anyone from historically resilient
communities. You already know this but I can’t stand watching movies that
somehow only have white extras– especially in places like New York City. It feels
to me like an incredibly violent imagination rooted in white supremacy. I found
myself wondering as I was reading: why these films and TV show? And does
Cortez’s reimagining then make them the product of Black imagination or is
there still the lingering phantom of whiteness that haunts them?
I
really like your reading that they’ve been reclaimed in entirety because the
poems are often imagining joy, longevity, and abundance. I was smiling to
myself on first reading because of how these poems reach towards joy and are
rich with sensory details that to me feel luxurious. Things like “lavender ice
cream,” “the distance sound of waves,” “falling into a bathtub of calendula /
and orange peel,” and well-made espresso drinks. Did you read “Frasier Crane
Toasts No One in Particular” as an extension of “Black Frasier Crane” like I
did? Since “Black Frasier” comes first in the sequence, I continued to read the
character through that recasting.
AA:
I think that the world of the poem where those re-imagined Black characters
exist has been changed if only for that moment to feel and express that
luxuriousness, complexity, and joy without whiteness butting in. I know that
all white extras in an imagined New York City is especially irritating because
the city itself looks nothing like that; it is a kind of erasure. I was
wondering too about why these particular movies and TV shows. I can’t help but
feel that the writer has a familiarity with these works and perhaps even a
fondness for them, but she’s able to look past that and point out the racial
erasure and violence in that imagined world. And I think that in the context of
the poems that’s where the subversion comes in. To take that violent white
supremist imagination and turn it on its head by reimagining at the center of
those stories Black characters and Black life.
Yes!
I definitely read the “Black Frasier Crane'' poems as a kind of series. What I
read as the recurrence of the same character in both poems felt fitting because
of the serial nature of the TV show it was referencing.
I
wanted to backtrack a little and touch on what I read as a sense of searching
throughout many of the poems but from a formal/craft point of view. I was
struck by the decision in many of the poems to not end with a period even though
in many of the poems there is use of punctuation. For example, in “Covered
Wagon as Spaceship” the poem ends “whose history, untold, / is not enough.
Anyway, it begins with abduction”. I noticed this on my first read through and
thinking about it made me feel like that gesture towards not finishing the
sentence, towards the openness on the page communicated something about the
searching never being done. As though the origin or explanation that the
speaker is looking for always lies elsewhere, beyond the page and language,
just out of reach. That choice might be small but it had a great effect on my
reading of the poems; as though that feeling was being conveyed through choice
of punctuation. I found it deeply compelling. Were there any formal/craft elements
in the collection that stood out to you in your reading?
LV:
Agreed, it’s a thoughtful move in the collection that I think is indicative of
the care put into writing Golden Ax.
My
tendency is to look at how form and content are conversing, so I was interested
in the visual caesurae Cortez uses across Golden
Ax. By visual caesurae I mean the intentional gaps between lyric fragments
in a line. An obvious interpretation of these caesurae would be that they help
amp up the idea of the fragmented archive. You know, like what is known versus
unknown in family history or the literal gaps in the archive. But I think
they’re also doing something else more subtle. There’s a thread of what feels
like conflict in deciding whether to recognize duality of self as two-ness that’s
abundant or rather to see it as a splitting of identity.
Duality
or two-ness can be seen visually in the dueling epigraphs by Sun Ra and Brigham
Young at the beginning of “Salt” and in the way “Dishwashing the Mammy Salt
& Pepper Shakers by Accident” emphasizes the word “two” on the left margin.
But I want to focus on where it feels most explicit in form and content. There
are two poems next to each other in the book that feel centered on
duality/multiplicity; “I’m Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here” is on
the right-hand page and “I learn to shoot a bow” is on the left.
When
we talk about poems, we often talk about the poet and the speaker as separate,
but in “I’m Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here” the speaker is the
poet, Rio Cortez. Here’s a bit from the poem:
To fit in we
practice not dancing I pull her hair
against our head and burn
the water
out she sucks in the lip of
our belly
I call her Rio say
Rio remind them of our one
white grandmother
do what it
takes to make them think we are like them
Because it is a risk to want us we close the bedroom door she reaches under
the blanket It’s
just me Rio and The Dark
Rio
Cortez splits in two in this poem, at first calling the other self “Rio” but
then referring to her as “The Dark.” This shift in name is telling. Should she
recognize the second Rio as herself or create distance and estrangement by
giving it a name like “The Dark”? There’s a moment later in the poem where it
says “It feels like there could be more / of us somewhere,” so further
fragmentation may exist but it’s unclear how the speaker feels about it. Though
later, there’s a moment that hints at her feelings for the second Rio. She
writes, “we show each other mercy” and I can’t help but infer that there’s
conflict that requires mercy.
Duality
that is abundance appears in the ending of “I learn to shoot a bow” which says:
against the willow. I guess this is where
I am Orion. With two birth stories.
In one story I come from a sea god
with the forest as my mother, and in
the other, I have no mother at all
Choosing
to embody Orion who has several birth stories, but these two major ones, is a
fascinating choice. Coincidentally as a constellation, Orion is composed of
several stars but there are two supergiants, Betelgeuse and Rigel. In this
iteration, the two birth stories read to me as a form of abundance. That not
only is there a full narrative for the speaker’s existence but there’s two.
To
close out our conversation in review, should we talk about, “Eden,” the last
poem in the collection?
AA:
That use and reading of the caesurae throughout the poems hits on the abundance
of origin that you mentioned. For me that was most explicit in those lines from
“I learn to shoot a bow.” What strikes me about this abundance of origins is
that it exists simultaneously in the searching for an origin. In searching the
speaker finds a number of possible origins, but the poems never feel
disappointed or down about that fact. Instead, the poems celebrate that
abundance of origins even if it can be conflicting, all which feels truer to
the murkiness in trying to find an origin. Often an origin isn’t located in
only one simple thing or place, but in multiple, sometimes sprawling places and
people. I think that throughout the book the poems grapple with that notion.
In
thinking about the final poem in the book, “Eden,” I wanted to touch on the
gesture of ascendance towards the end of the poem.
at the beginning
of which could, I suppose, be anything
cul-de-sac, just as well, a saucer, rising up,
up to the summit, it’s possible I’ve never been
higher, I feel it, I’m really leaving now
moving through the told story
I
found the transformation of the cul-de-sac into a flying saucer really striking
as a way to ascend into and away from a place. As though perhaps it doesn't
matter what your mode of transport is so long as it can take you away. It was
also in keeping with some of the sci-fi imagery from earlier in the book and I
appreciated its return. What I found noteworthy too is that movement at the end
where ultimately the speaker is taken to heights they have never known, are
nearly disappearing, and finally ascend into the “told story.” That movement
felt to me like a collapse of time, where the speaker is simultaneously moving
into and through a story that is being told by someone else. We are watching
the speaker ascend into the mythic, but at the same time the myth is being
told, while also keeping the speaker alive in some sense.
While
it's a stretch, I can’t help but think (perhaps because of the sci-fi and
Western imagery) about that recurring line from the show Westworld: “You live only as long as the last person who remembers
you.” Which then for me also echoes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “So long as men
can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to
thee.” Once the speaker ascends into the realm of story, as long as the story
is told the speaker continues to live in some way. That feeling of the
continuous and unending is also reinforced for me through the choice of not
having a period on the last line, especially when it is used elsewhere in the
text. The poem, the speaker, their story has no end. What were your thoughts on
this final poem?
LV:
“Eden” was a phenomenal way to end the collection. The title evokes for me the
Biblical telling of Adam and Eve from Genesis–you know, eating from the Tree of
Knowledge and their exile from the Garden of Eden. The poem ties together the
thematic threads we discussed earlier but also transcends to move into a place
of self-affirmation and reclamation. I felt like the “told story” that is
mentioned in “Eden” echoes back to the second poem in the collection, “Covered Wagon as Spaceship,” which says “I am a child feeling / extraterrestrial; whose
history, untold, / is not enough.” The speaker who has longed for and worked so
hard to reckon with the gaps in their family history or “untold story” and who
has created multiple narratives to make sense of their place in the world is
now ready to move past them. In “Eden” the speaker proclaims,
there must be countless allegories
but I’m only interested in one
am I home or am I only visiting? I am through
with asking,
I
love this moment in the poem– a question and then a rejection of the need to ask.
It’s powerful and assured. The speaker is taking control. I like how you’ve described the speaker as
ascending because it feels like an emotional, spiritual, and physical
ascension. Or perhaps it’s more like a departure from the bounds of story whether
it’s their families’, their own, or other people’s stories about them. We can
often feel these stories define us, but more often than not they feel like a
dead-end (like a cul-de-sac) where we’re forced to exit from where we entered
rather than to continue moving forward and onward.
Alfredo
Aguilar is the author of On This Side of the Desert (Kent
State University Press, 2020), selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom
Wick Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and
has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers'
Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest,
Waxwing, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Born and raised in
North County San Diego, he now resides in Central Texas where he is a fellow at
the Michener Center for Writers.
Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s
Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She earned her MFA
at Rutgers University—Newark and has been awarded fellowships and scholarships
from the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, National Book Critics
Circle’s Emerging Critics Program, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the
Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at University of Texas-Austin. Her writing has
appeared in Guernica, AGNI, The American Poetry Review,
and elsewhere.
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