Poetry Is All That Wires Us Together: A Conversation with Garrett Caples about LOVERS OF TODAY

Garrett Caples is a poet and writer. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco. Lovers of Today feature poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining.

Tiffany Troy: Why name your collection after a bar? How does the title poem, “Lovers of Today” open the door to your collection?

Garrett Caples: Ultimately, it’s really naming it after a poem, because that’s the title of the poem. And that was probably the first thing I wrote in the book because my last book came out in 2016, and I wrapped it up maybe a year before. “Lovers Of Today” is the newest of the new batch.

It’s a cool title and that’s a title of this poem and it was an exciting poem to write. But the poem got the title from the bar, and the bar—ultimately, it’s from a Pretenders song. At a certain point, I listened to the song to make sure everything is okay. It’s a good song.

There’s a reason why you can’t copyright titles, because they circulate in these different ways. It’s kind of more of the poem, but it was an earlier part of the book. I get married in the middle of the book. So the early part of the book is certainly about a type of bachelorhood.

It’s just a good title. I tried some other titles, and it didn’t really come off. It’s the first line of the first poem, too. I used to be very against that idea of having the first line of a poem be the title. But when I come up with these little prejudices about poetry, I try to break them. I make myself do things that I don’t like and ask what do I do with that.

I always didn’t like taking a book title from a poem. It’s just more real estate to have fun with. None of my other books had a title poem. This is the first one. I did that partly to push against my own prejudices.

Tiffany Troy: I think that’s so cool and wonderful. Especially with the epigraph by Alli Warren: “I enjoy my drink, but not enough to name a book after a bar!” Right after, you have your title poem. Sometimes you really can believe two things at once, which really goes to how you go against your little prejudices.

I loved how your poems are rooted in place, in New York, California, Russia, and travel to these places. I see the surreal and how everyday observances in your poems become strange and beautiful, like with the onion-shaped dome or your dream about Ra. Could you speak to your writing process?

Garrett Caples: I am very much of a collect-the-poems-when-they-are-done type of poet. I don’t worry about having enough poems for a book in advance. Inevitably, books have their own personalities to them. It’s neat in a way because on the one hand, putting out a book artificially stops whatever you are doing. You might be on a roll in this way, and just out of necessity, tie a knot. There is something kind of artificial about that process vis-à-vis your own creative processes, so sometimes you like think a book correspond to more natural rhythm of where you’re like.

In terms of how the poems all relate to each other, it’s just where I’m at in a given point. But I keep on changing. If I start to get into a thing, where I’m like a certain sort of poem, I just get bored. I don’t want to have a style. In a way, the poems declare their own style and their own form. In my earlier books, there was a lot of formal striving that’s all gone now. I just figure it out as I go along and it declares its own format. I never have to think about it too much anymore, which can be good or bad. I look at some of my early books that I find kind of amazing. But because they were so formally driven and that’s relaxed, I just become more of a human being, I suppose. I just am a poet now so I just don’t worry in making individual pieces of art.

Tiffany Troy: My next question is directly tied to being attuned to being a poet. Do your poems find their form or vice versa? I am wondering if you could describe how the poems find their form?

Garrett Caples: It’s one of those things that’s almost different every time. Discussions of process break down because I don’t think I have a process. On some level, each poem has its own thing. Each one feels like a painting. It has its own life. I don’t have a process as such: a lot of it is that I just get irritated with myself.

My poems tend to hew to the left-hand margin. Ultimately, as creative as you can be with layout, ultimately you should be able to do it with no layout. The form of the poem “Lovers of Today,” is ultimately about forcing myself away from the left-hand margin. The way it came through with that poem, in a certain way it’s the feel of the trip I was on in New York, which lent itself to it. I went to New York a million times, but it was a particularly exciting trip.

There is a line from a John Lennon song “New York City.” “Que pasa New York” is a line from that song. That song had that kind of feel too. A London guy in New York and loving it and being blown away. It wasn’t a new thing, just like it wasn’t new thing for him either. He wrote the song in the 1970’s, and he’d already been to New York a bunch. But you can be there and suddenly the city just opens up in great ways. I was trying to get some of that headiness into the poem and have it swirl in that way.

There aren’t that many of these types of poems in the book. Ultimately, though, poetry shouldn’t depend too heavily on layout. I’m trying to get the words down and not worry about the layout so much.

That said, layout for me is a lot about line breaks. There’s so much action in my short line poems, that I do not feel the need to scatter words all over the page. The break itself is doing the work. That got weird on me in this book. In the poems, “Emotional Rescue” or “Hairy Sniff,” some lines started breaking in the middle of words. It sounds silly but it wasn’t a conscious decision, but that’s how it came whenever I tap into when I am writing poem. For those poems, I would practice reading them to make sure I remember how the syntax goes vis-à-vis the line breaks.

The way I became a poet ultimately was realizing that poems are just sentences laid out a certain way. I’m always working on setting the syntax against the line break. I’m not reinventing the wheel there, but that’s how I figured how to be a poet at all. Realizing that I knew how to write good sentences and use that against line breaks what you’re doing for line break. Sometimes, the line breaks are just deeply motivated and sometimes it’s just size, and you are just making a column of some sort.

Tiffany Troy: Thank you for sharing that eureka moment with us, the idea of writing sentences and tapping into the poet inside of you and doing the line breaks as they go. Something that I love about your collection is the rambunctiousness of your voice that is at once complex and wry with humor. Could you speak about how you construct and maintain this voice?

Garrett Caples: The voice is the whole thing really, on a certain level. I don’t have any problems with that. Maybe I should have greater ambitions.

I write a great deal of conventional, exposition prose, like for let’s say the New York Times. But unless I’m not allowed to, I have to write in first person.  It’s not like it’s one voice either. You make different voices with it. I realized that so much of what’s compelling about the literary experience is ultimately not the stories or the plot or anecdotes or the sentiment even of poetry, it’s the way of talking and finding a compelling way to put things.

We’re in a cultural movement where there’s not much to do in terms of formal innovation even though I studied a lot of modernist poetry and it’s all modernist innovation. But it’s almost all been tried at a certain point, and so, what’s the next thing after that? I don’t have an answer to that, except I know as an editor of poetry as well as a writer and reader, I just need the poetry to not sound like everyone else. There’s a lot of poetry that is pretty good and accomplished, but it all sound the same. I’ve heard that sound before.

It’s probably hard to have any kind of real perspective on your own poetry, but I don’t think anybody’s poetry sounds like mine. And I feel that in this cultural moment, that’s the measure of becoming a poet, if it sounds like you and there’s no other person you can slot in there. For the poets that I really admire, that’s just the case: you won’t be able to mistake one poet for another poet.

Tiffany Troy: I think that is exactly right. And that’s what community building, gathering, and celebration are all about, which are the different voices and what makes us different.

Garrett Caples: But there’s a lot of pressure to conform at the same time. The poetry community tends to favor a certain range of individuality and so you’ve got to push back against that. Because of the MFA system, so much poetry comes through that system. So inevitably, there is certain amounts of homogenization that goes on. I’m not knocking that world because many of my friends and people I admire come through that. But you’ve got to figure out how to get through it and break out of it.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I became a poet. I just knew I wanted to be a writer, and I found myself studying to become a professor at Berkeley. I wasn’t really interested in becoming a professor, and I just didn’t know how you can become a writer at all. So even though I did finish the degree but I abandoned the profession. But I don’t regret getting this PhD, because it got me out to San Francisco, you know, and put me in a writers’ town. For poetry, I feel like, besides New York, it’s the best town to be a writer in. San Francisco’s got such a center of gravity and literary tradition to it, and it still maintains that character even in this Silicon Valley age. So much poetry of great import of the second half of the 20th century originates here.

I was lucky because I didn’t really know this and went to Berkley because it was a highly-ranked grad school. I went to Rutgers as an undergrad, but they were all very bad. They wrote mainstream, hip stuff, and I just wasn’t hip enough to know where in New York you could get some good poetry. I stumbled through the English department at Berkley and that led to the rest of my life.

My other poet friends, like Jackson Meazle from Little Rock, Arkansas went to San Francisco State and Micah Ballard went to the University of Louisiana in Lafayetteas an undergrad but used that to become a grad student at New College of California. Both of them came to San Francisco because San Francisco is the poetry mecca, and they already knew that. I just stumbled out here and got lucky.

Tiffany Troy: I really love that story and isn’t everyone so excited about San Francisco. Your poems have this specific sense of humor that also cuts against yourself. It’s self-deprecating but at the same time you also glow.

What are some themes in your collection in your collection? What do you want the reader to get out of it?

Garrett Caples: This book is a funny book because part of is I’m pushing 50 and people start to die on you, especially if you are in the arts. You meet people at the top of the mountain, they are old people, and they die. Philip Lamantia was like 71 when we met and I was probably 26 or 27. But it’s what I love about poetry: there is so much intergenerational hanging out that I find very stimulating among the poets in San Francisco, Some of the people who I’ve met have been the most important and the greatest experiences of my life.

But if you’re any good at all, a real poet can see that. You get access to the top people in poetry quickly in a way that doesn’t happen in other more money-driven art scenes, because there’s no money in here. You get to hang out with Ashberry and Creeley as a young man. I was good enough that I could do it.

There’s a lot of deaths in the book, and at one point I thought about calling the book, Death. But it didn’t quite fit. The death material is fairly celebratory, and I try to speak of the people who meant the world to me. Some of the people are very old too, but it almost makes it worse when someone really old dies because you just get so used to relying on them being there. It doesn’t feel better when the person is in the 70’s or 80’s when they die than if somebody younger dies. It’s not a book about COVID, but it fits this time because it has this undercurrent of dying to it.

The last piece in the book, “Soul Book” is a poem I wrote for an art book called People Are a Light to Love: Memorial Drawings, 2004–2016. The artist, Veronica DeJesus, was a San Francisco artist who is now in LA. She worked at a well-known bookstore called Dog Eared Books. When somebody personally connected to her or a famous person that she was interested in would die, she would do a memorial drawing and stick them in the window. Over the course of several years, Veronica ended up doing around 300 drawings. She was looking for someone to write a text for her art book that wasn’t essay, but creative. So I wrote a sample, the first two or three paragraphs based on her drawings. It’s a first-person sentence for every drawing. The piece appeared as prose paragraphs in People Are a Light to Love. Then, for Lovers of Today, my editor at Wave, Joshua Beckman, suggested splitting the paragraphs into individual lines, which gave a second life to the piece as a long poem. It’s all about death, because all the photos are based on someone dying.  

There’s obvious overlap in our tastes. But Vernoica and I come from very different places and with different lives, so she had plenty of figures in there I knew nothing about. I would read around about X, Y or Z person until like some sort of luminous detail emerged and put it in the poem. That was a years’-long process of hers, and we published our book pre-COVID. But it feels like for this time because it feels like we’ve gone through so much death.

The book’s last poem or two before the long poem were from the very beginning of the pandemic. I was actually in France when the pandemic happened, doing my first and thus far only writing residency. I was in France at the time, in February and March of 2020. In mid-March 2020, I had to leave very suddenly. The last few poems are set in France and then ends in San Francisco.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today and do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: I’m always working on something. I’m an editor at City Lights, so I do a lot of other people’s books. To me, being a poet gives you permission to apply yourself to any literary endeavor. Sometimes that means editing somebody’s book, and sometimes that means writing your own book.

Since I finished writing the collection, I’ve done a McMclore book at City Lights. During the pandemic, I wrote around 7 prose pieces that I’m trying to see if I can turn into a book. I don’t want to think of it as a book of commercial fiction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with that. I think of them as fables or parables. I would like to publish with a poetry press and not worry about that.

Tiffany Troy: Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: What I’m trying to do as a poet and editor of poetry as I do a contemporary poetry series in City Lights is to try to maintain the integrity of collections of lyric poetry. There’s at least one school of avant-garde thought that lyric poetry is retrograde, and they are incorrect. The books I publish at Spotlight are hard to market, because I pick poets who can write good poems, and I avoid project-oriented poetry for the most part. Project-oriented poetry is easier to market and come up with clever things to say about them. There are a lot of poets out there, but ultimately you are only as good as a one-page poem. If your poem depends too much on sequential, serial stuff, I’m skeptical. There’s plenty of great poetry like that, so I’m not trying to make a blanket announcement.

What I’m trying to do is to carve out a space for real lyric poetry. I still feel like I publish avant-garde poetry. There’s no contradiction between lyric and avant-garde. That’s the type of thing I’m up to. The great bits of poetry are microscopic, so you want to preserve the arena that happens in versus all the pressures to write a book. It’s all ambition-driven, and not driven by the poem. I’m trying to do things where the poem is driving everything you do. It might hurt you career-wise, but you have to not care about that and think about the art.

Walls and Mirrors: Enacting the Howls of War A Conversation with Deborah Paredez about her newest poetry collection, Year of the Dog

Deborah Paredez is a poet, ethnic studies scholar, cultural critic, and longtime diva devotee whose writing explores the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. Her latest book, Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), is a Blessings the Boat Selection, Poetry Winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award of Poetry. It tells of her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.

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Tiffany Troy: Could you introduce yourself and talk about the history leading up to the writing of Year of the Dog?

Deborah Paredez: I am Deborah Paredez and the author of Year of the Dog. I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and read Trojan Women for the first time. I became completely enamored with that play and obsessed with Hecuba in particular. It was around that time when I became aware of the silences in our home around my father's participation in the Vietnam War.

In some ways, my understanding of myself as a poet was tied to the experience of being the daughter of war and tied to the tradition of feminist elegy. The motif of Hecuba crying out plays itself out in this book and it took thirty to forty years to write the book that in some ways I had been meant to write from the beginning.

Tiffany Troy: How is Year of the Dog a book “with and not just about your father”?

Deborah Paredez: In my childhood, because there was so much silence around the war, I often sneaked into my dad's closet where he stored his photo album from Vietnam. I would pour over these photo albums like a kid reading Playboy. I knew instinctively that perhaps answers to the questions hanging in the air about my household could be found in these photos.

Even though I thought I was being sneaky, my family knew. Many years later, when my family was cleaning out the house my mom said, “I'm going to send you these photos that I know mean something to you. You can scan and then send them back to us.” So I did. I realized these photos held a very important archive not just for my father's experience, but also of Latino participation in Vietnam. This experience, in turn, has historically been and continues to be documented incompletely. As a result, I wanted to engage deeply with those archives and to co-create this work with my father. I understood that we were co-creators of this work since he was the photographer whose work I was engaging through my poetry.

On a literal level, I asked for permission to use my father’s archive. Being “with” my father, as opposed to “about” him also had a political meaning. It meant carrying a sense of reverence for him and his story from the perspective of the daughter, as opposed to transforming him into an object of study.

Tiffany Troy: As a poet, it always felt clear to me that the stories of the Vietnam War are told through your lens as you father’s daughter. How was the process like, weaving personal artifacts with iconographic images of war at home and abroad?

Deborah Paredez: Finding my father’s photographs was important in a number of ways. One aspect that really mattered was that the photographs were in the same medium, photography, by which we have often come to know about the Vietnam era. The Vietnam War was the most photographically-documented war because reporters had unrestricted access to combat. As a result, the reporters brought about those images that we saw on the nightly news with images of the dead. These images ultimately fueled protests against the war.

The photographic image, however, has in many ways over-determined our engagement with and our knowledge about that war. I was interested in defamiliarizing the photographs for the readers/viewers. Even as the photographs document, they have also inured us to those horrors. I wanted to re-familiarize us all with these horrors through an aesthetics of fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, echo, etc. I wanted to implicate the history and stories that iconic photographs of war tell by buttressing them against my father’s photographic archives to expose the racialized terms of inclusion, to foreground the often overlooked Black and Brown experiences of war.

Tiffany Troy: That triptych with Mary Ann Vecchio in the middle and buttressed by the arm of the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc on either side definitely challenged my understanding of war through the archive. What guided you to juxtapose photographic fragments and how do your father’s handwritten photographic captions fit into the iconography of the stories you're weaving together to allow us to view the Vietnam War anew?

Deborah Paredez: I was very much guided by a poetics of fragmentation in bringing down iconic photographs to an arm, for instance. I juxtaposed the images through resonance or a kind of image rhyme visual rhyme or by images that are stitched together so they exposed the seams of each other. We knew the rest of the picture and implicated ourselves in our familiarity. I also wanted to show that there was only so much I could reclaim in excavating my father's story and the stories of soldiers like him. There was a partiality—in all senses of that word—because I was speaking as the daughter of this experience.

Using my father’s captions that he scrawled on the back of some of his photographs was important because of the way by which we're trained to understand the photos. I wanted his voice to be present and handwriting always implied the presence of the body. I fragmented and excerpted those captions so that as to foreground the sense of partiality, the elusive subject that was always present in this work.

Tiffany Troy: You made sure that your father's face did not appear in the collection. Why?

Deborah Paredez: It's important to always interrogate our attempts to represent the other, whether that other is my father or Kim Phuc or Angela Davis, and to understand the power dynamic between the writer and the other. For me, it was to present while emphasizing that I can only ever grasp partially my father’s experience. As such, preserving his privacy and rendering his own subject preserved and inaccessible to me and to us is important.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use songs and howls to add texture to your collection?

Deborah Paredez: In a very early version of the poem “Hecuba on the Shores of Al-Faw, 2003,” a sonnet, I realized I was being a little too tidy because I was trying to preserve the 10 syllables per line. Tinkering with the poem helped me realize the ways in which the book had to reenact the indecipherable howl.

I tried to do that in the final poem in the collection, the untitled concrete poem that repeats and fragments the final lines of the second poem in the book. I hoped to leave the reader with a "pang led" howl, wanting to require the reader to make the sound so that we're all heaving together, so that we see the limitations of language.

We also see the howl in “Year of the Dog: Synonyms for Aperture,” in the howling of “O—H—I—O—I—OH—OH—OH—” and in the Janis Joplin reference in "Self-Portrait with Howling Woman."

Tiffany Troy: Year of the Dog is the product of meticulous research. Turning to the specific example of the Edgewood Elegy, what is the nitty gritty process like?

Deborah Paredez: The nitty gritty is always boring, being the nitty gritty. Writing the “Edgewood Elegy” was difficult because Black and Brown people’s relationship to documentation has always been overdetermined yet un(der)-documented within the larger US imaginary despite having served in high numbers proportionally in the Vietnam War.

When I was writing Year of the Dog, Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” came out. Black and Brown soldiers are almost nowhere in that multi-episode documentary. Part of the reason we remain undocumented even in the most valorous moments, is that during the Vietnam era, Latinos were still (mis)characterized racially as White. Researchers literally counted the Spanish surnames in the casualty list to get a guesstimate.

Fortunately, in the Edgewood case, there was an actual monument in San Antonio documenting the names that the community could document. I poured over those names, plugging them into governmental and other databases. One site listed Vietnam War veteran casualties and whatever additional information that the site could collect, like if they were a Corporal or what unit they served in, or if they had siblings.

While there were many pockets of no information, I wanted that poem to capture both the absence of these men and the absence of the documentation and my struggles to attain that so that is how that poem came about.

Tiffany Troy: How do the three epigraphs set up the realities, narratives, and mythologies of the three sections that follow?

Deborah Paredez: The epigraphs very much provide a Venn diagram for the book.

I wanted the quote about Hecuba from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to be the original mythic cry from which this book makes its echoes. I also wanted to signal that while the stories of people of color I tell may appear very regional, it is a tragedy or story worthy of the epic treatment. In Adrienne Rich, I find a feminist committed to bearing witness to experiences that may not have always been hers. Her explicitly feminist ideology and feminist poetics was important in my own upbringing as an unabashedly feminist poet. June Jordan speaks to the very particular experience of racialized subjects. In her case, speaking about Black communities, she insists that we respond in ways that correspond with the scale of our tragedies. Within the context of this country her insistence that we are beyond time for being reasonable echoes through all three epigraphs. In these senses, all three of them are about that howl, which set the tone to guide readers into the mode that the book would register in.

Tiffany Troy: The second section speaks of Kim Phuc’s extraordinary and one-of-a-kind story. How do you bring yourself and your culture into her story?

Deborah Paredez: As a work of documentary poetry my book is invested in exposing the ideological work that photographs and other official archives do. In its aspirations toward feminist elegy, it is also invested in exposing the gendered terms of war imagery. In the collection, I explore the ways in which “othered” women, whether they are Black, Vietnamese or the teenage runaway (in the case of Mary Ann Vecchio), have been positioned in war photography, both in service of war or its resistance.

Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc is exemplary of how war images often perform a kind of violence, even as we understand that immediately after taking that photograph, Ut helped Kim Phuc get to a hospital. It took a lot of soul searching to find a way to reach across time, space, and other divides toward Kim Phuc’s specific story with a sense of care and commitment to retrieving the subject from the ways she had been rendered an object. Part of it involved reading into Kim Phuc’s history. I relied heavily on a great book called The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong, which spoke of Kim Phuc both before and after the moment captured by Ut's camera. Kim Phuc spent some time in Cuba. While there, she briefly took a trip to Mexico. In that initial trip, she was hoping to defect. Kim Phuc and her coterie visited the Temple of the Sun and while she decided in that moment that her overseers were too vigilant, I was struck by her own journey that took her to places that have particular resonance for me and my people. I was interested in having Kim Phuc be in a mythic location, both situated in and trapped by history. So I latched on this tiny moment in her own biography and did some documentary speculative work that that one does when you're a documentary poet.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate Vietnamese geographies and the Vietnamese faith into the poems about Kim Phuc at the Temple of Cao Dai and the Temple of the Sun?

Deborah Paredez: I was very fortunate that a dear friend of mine, Hoa Nguyen happens to be a Vietnamese historian. She became a consultant to me about not only how to be factual but also how to incorporate certain elements with a kind of cultural specificity. I didn't incorporate very explicitly a lot of iconography or spiritual elements, or even mythic elements of Vietnamese Buddhism, aside from what Kim Phuc’s own biography engages in.

It was important to pick up on the biographical details: Kim Phuc and others were at the temple hiding out. The temple is a sanctuary that is no longer safe in the war and its aftermath. It was really important for me to begin in the temple, in the moments before the bombing, to emphasize that Kim Phuc exists before that moment, just as she exists long after it.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate and refract the different identities through place names and languages other than English in a predominantly English language collection?

Deborah Paredez: Year of the Dog addresses both the insufficiency and violence of language. Hecuba was so grief stricken that she barked or howled. The most mundane or clichéd form of language, like the idiom, possess a kind of violence that is largely unseen.

With the use of Spanish and English, I was chatting with my friend, Sadiya Hartman, about the book and she said something like, "It makes sense that you would be writing about Hecuba because of La Llorona.” La Llorona was the mythic Mexican folkloric figure of the weeping woman. Until that moment, I hadn't made that explicit connection, but it made so much sense, and I was grateful for her insights. Putting La Llorona alongside Hecuba reflected my own poetic and artistic traditions. It was important for me to have the reader see that La Llorona is just as kind of mythic and as epic and important as Hecuba.

Similarly, much as Latinx communities are often predetermined in terms of language and documentation, I think of the meaning of having my last name spelt with a Z and not S in one of my poems. What does it mean to have a last name as “walls” (paredes) misspelled?

Tiffany Troy: Earlier, you were talking about “Paredez” meaning wall misspelled. You also wrote of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial becoming a mirror in the collection. How does the wall versus the mirror dichotomy play into your collection?

Deborah Paredez: The walls and mirrors idea came about in a very literal way. When I was 12, I went on a road trip with the neighbors to the Vietnam Memorial. It was the 1980’s, not long after the war, and I remember visiting the Memorial and being very moved. The Memorial’s granite was so polished, purposefully so, that you could see your reflection and were thus implicated in the losses carved into its walls. Beyond this moment, I was writing this book in 2018, which was, at that time, the year with the highest number of school shootings in the nation's history. I wanted the reader to experience being separate from the historical subject and yet included in its present-day impact.

Tiffany Troy: How do you approach talking about the way in which the women are grieving through the loss through their fathers, brothers, husbands, and family members?

Deborah Paredez: It’s definitely dangerous, right? With the mythic women, it's a little bit easier because they're not going to be so damaged by my clumsy attempt. But historical women, like Deborah Johnson, Angela Davis, Kim Phuc and Mary Ann Vecchio, among others, were women to whom I wanted to pay respect. I found that if I wrote in the second person, almost like I was writing a love letter to them. The second person, then, shows the poet genuinely attempting to reach across time and space to honor them.

Tiffany Troy: How do you both honor veterans and protestors who want out of Vietnam?

Deborah Paredez: Many veteran writers before me get at the complexities of the Vietnam War. Yusef Komunyakaa is an exemplary model of a veteran poet who both writes about his own experiences in Vietnam as a Black soldier in a way that's not jingoistic while also not dismissive of the particular struggles faced by soldiers like him.

In my collection, I wanted to show how in these imperialist projects, those who are often most devalued are summoned to maintain or expand the reach of the colonial order. For me, then, it was important to begin with the story of my mother and grandmother. As much as this book is about my father, this book is an origin story about how I learned to grieve and to shout out against war from maternal figures.

I wanted to foreground how Latino experiences, even in regards to Vietnam War, were just as diverse as White experiences. In “Self-Portrait in One Act,” which features the fascinating story of Delia Alvarez and her brother Everett Alvarez, Delia becomes an anti-war activist even while her brother is being held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Delia doesn't want to be deployed in the ways that the POW families are often deployed. She's like, “No, you will not use me that way right, because what you are doing is wrong, even as I am honoring my brother's experience there.” Delia is a perfect example of the kind of experiences that I wanted to bring to bear.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use poetic forms to challenge the propaganda of war?

Deborah Paredez: Documentary poetry is very much invested in using a poet's intimacy with the vicissitudes of language to trouble the document, whether that document is a decree, an edict, a speech or photograph. Coming out of that tradition of documentary poetry, I am invested in both troubling and generating documentation through a poetics of erasure, repetition, and idiomatic (il)logic. How do we rearrange the idioms so that they tell a different story about war and warfare? For me, this approach to poetics helped me think through and beyond the particular ways that language gets debased in war propaganda.

Tiffany Troy: In the “Edgewood Elegy,” the poem visually takes the shape of little, lined up gravestone markers. Other poems take the form of lists. Does the poem like find it's form or do you choose the form intentionally and then the contents are to come to be?

Deborah Paredez: More often than not, the poem finds its form. So, in the case of “Edgewood Elegy,” as I was trying to gain information about these casualties, I just kept coming up again and again against the silence in the archive. Part of me wanted to build a poetic monument—there was certainly an actual monument built in San Antonio—and to render within that monument the silence. I wanted to stage the monumental-ness of that silence, to insist that we disorient or reorient ourselves to acknowledge this grief, so you have to actually turn the page, to literally turn the page to see the history.

In other times, I deploy received forms, like in the opening poem, “Wife’s Disaster Manual,” which is a villanelle. The villanelle in its obsessive repetition, is ideal for the insistent instruction. I found it was a perfect container for holding Lot's wife's insistence that we stand still, and keep standing still, and still, and refuse to look away from the burning city.

As a formalist, I am interested in how form determines our way of knowing. I'm not just reverential toward form but deeply curious about finding its seams so as to undo them. Sometimes the form or the photograph need to be deconstructed, rendered, or ripped apart at times, to spill out of the frame.

Tiffany Troy: In closing, what are you working on today?

Deborah Paredez: I'm working on a work of literary nonfiction, a memoir about my life with divas and their role in my life. About how divas guided me as a Brown poet, thinker, essayist and performance critic. And about how, even though we often associate divas with kind of the singularity, divas have actually taught me to really love and be in relation to virtuosic messy women and not be afraid of them. And I’m also working on some prose poems or lyrical essays about the sea and all of the things that the sea evokes for those of us people of color.

As the poet would anything beautiful: A Conversation with Carly Inghram about her newest poetry collection, The Animal Indoors

Carly Inghram is a poet from Atlanta. Her first collec­tion, Sometimes the Blue Trees, was released from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2019. Her newest poetry collection, The Animal Indoors, is the winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize. She currently lives in Manhattan and teaches kindergarten in the Bronx.

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Tiffany Troy: Can you introduce yourself to your readers of the world?

Carly Inghram: My name is Carly Inghram. I am a poet and writer. I am interested in the intersection of nature or the earth—physical things—and the spiritual world.

Tiffany Troy: In one of your poems, you write how the poet creates a woman who never appears in real life, that of a woman dancing for money on the train, as the poet would anything beautiful. How do nature and reality intermingle with each other and inform your preoccupations?

Carly Inghram: Really interesting line that you have pulled out. I do think it’s connected to what I’m saying. Like we can use things in the material world in order to find beautiful, or insert word there or insert object of desire there. Longing, craving, etc. I think we can use physical things in the world to create what is being longed for. The process of making is a very wonderful process, allowing us to create new landscapes and new places that we’ve been wanting.

Tiffany Troy: I found the tension between material and spiritual wealth very interesting in your poems. You have female characters who do not crave for gold, but personhood. The line, “She didn’t want gold like the powerful, she wanted it like the weak” reminded me of the Christian idea of how to be humbled is actually to be powerful. How does that inversion help you underscore the beauty of things beyond the price tag placed on them?

Carly Inghram: Lol at Christianity because that’s very much my upbringing. I feel like as a gay or queer or insert word here woman, I have a strong faith background. I feel some tension there like it didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I still felt like spirituality was alive for me and has always been a part of my life. Maybe strictly to the context of Christianity and maybe more broadly. I still love the practices of Christianity which is beautiful or can be at its core but inversions allowed me to see how in a similar vein, I can create or make truth in a certain way, and maybe we can make truth as we continue to see we are all connected and belong to this world.

Tiffany Troy: In the collection you also bring forward the dancing girl emoji which really roots the poem in the present as opposed to 100 years or 200 years ago. But you also talk about womanhood and gender identities and I feel like the idea of belonging runs throughout history. How do you play with the idea of what is virtual like what can be downloaded and the real?

Carly Inghram: Reading a lot of poets has been useful, because there's a lot of poets who do similar things or play with language in interesting ways. So I've definitely learned a lot from reading. Aside from that, skills I have learned from one of my favorite poets, Morgan Parker, who came to the MFA one time and talked about how she included the Real Housewives in her poems. She did not want anything of her world to be left out from her poems. I thought that was very impactful and that idea stuck with me.

The word “downloaded” is helpful because we, as people have a lot of information that is downloaded. There is a lot of given information via apps or systems that we live in. Via friends or just via everything like living life. There is a lot of downloaded information and part of the process of making that I have learned or inherited is to download that information. A friend just said this to me and it’s been on mind. There is no proper history because history is currently happening and we are in it.

Tiffany Troy: You have a lot of found quotes where the speaker filters what she is hearing. It becomes interior dialogue between the found quote. A lot of the time, the poet disagrees with what is being said. How do the quotes find their way into your poem and how do you transform it?

Carly Inghram: I was really interested in this question because the poet is me and loosely, a lot of the poems are me-based in a way that feels story-based. We are very much in it and we are continually inventing new things about ourselves. So I feel part of me as an invention. In this place in my life, I was realizing that there were parts of me that felt less like they belong to me that belong to us. It’s not like in my present I don’t identify with some of those parts which can feel tricky and it can feel hard to encounter old parts of ourselves because it’s like I don’t want to look at that past. I think that’s part of the tension.

It can be easier for me when I encounter a new person to play and project to them what I am remembering as an old part of myself.

Tiffany Troy: How do you move from the real and the everyday into the metaphysical or mythical, like the rivers, the waves, their paths, drowning and resistance? How do you craft your poems to go into completely different realms?

Carly Inghram: Again, you are very perceptive. Many of my poems are literally moving. I write while walking, on the train, and it is just something that interests me. I used to feel I needed to finish poems in one swoop, and maybe I still do that. When I do finish the poem in a single sitting, I’ll notice that I hit the end of the thought, the end of a story, or the end of what I’m feeling. I will notice that I need a kind of beat or some sort of measure and switch into a new channel.

In a similar way to repetition, I move in and out into different realms, mostly as a vehicle of sound. My late brother was a musician and I feel a lot of my writing is inherited wealth from him. I aspire to create music the way that he did. A lot of sound play can be useful to me when I have hit a stop. I use repetition as a vehicle to enter a new place.

Tiffany Troy: How else does repetition function in your work, and by that I mean, there is amplification, there is the inversion and there’s also a way in which the number of times a word or even a line is repeated seems meaningful.

Carly Inghram: I was thinking about this question a lot because I feel like it’s related to the sound pattern of how I think but also how I grew up in a certain way.

I can recall my mom just repeating and repeating things when it’s important so a large part is definitely amplification, so if I keep saying it, it’s important. Things that feel meaningful to me or I was surprised by, like I really like. Repetition is useful in poems and in writing but also in real life, in the physical world.

Tiffany Troy: In your work there is a prose poem where you talk about the crayon color, which talks about the actual color of a thing. But it also underscores the poet as a kid before skin color was a thing. Then there’s also the idea of color as an object, as in gold chains. And color as a subject, which is the way society views Black individuals. How does color shape your work?

Carly Inghram: My use of color feels very informed by my brother’s music. He loved the color blue, which was his favorite color. This drew me to using color in my work. As a person of color, I am also aware of color functioning in that way. When I grew up, my mother was white and my father was black. From a young-ish age, I was aware that in some ways I was strange or different. My writing in some ways is always dealing with that. My writing is aware that there’s though my Black friends tell me I’m not different, there is a feeling of difference I used to feel like I had to contend or battle with.

Nowadays, I like color as another means of creation or making. But there’s also a part of me that’s aware that color has a lot of different meanings for different people and can be really loaded as a topic.

Tiffany Troy: How does womanhood and the idea of approaching it with some trepidation, intersect with the idea of color in your poem? One of the lines from the poem right before your prose poem is “The store I’m in or this world keeps asking me if I want my receipt.”

Carly Inghram: That’s a great question. Finding my identity as a woman or queer woman or Black woman as connected was really useful for me, because it helped me see in my particular experience how other struggles are connected. Understanding and learning that all struggles are connected was really useful information. About the “receipt line”: part of my story at that time was that both of these identities are linked in a certain way to capitalism. In order to be a woman, for instance, they needed me to dress I certain way, I needed to have certain things, I needed to do certain things. All of these things felt very linked to the capitalist system. It was interesting for me to discover that things that I thought were just inherent qualities that belong to me are part of a larger system.

Tiffany Troy: One of the biggest curiosities I had is why would a work so interested in putting to question capitalist ideas also be obsessed with celebrities? I found your framing or take on the celebrities to be the most fun or interesting part of the celebrities section of your work. How does the idea of celebrity function in your poem and how does that in turn sort of reflect on like the poet as like an individual?

Carly Inghram: I’m super interested in celebrities because all of us experience the pressure to present in a certain way or feeling like there is an audience and how to present to and show up to those people. Like, I want to be liked, I want to be loved even. A lot of it feels tied to social media culture, or something that is literally programmed into us. For that reason, I feel like to be a celebrity and to have an actual audience feels like a really terrifying place to be. I find they can be interesting characters because I think I can often feel like with a literal like no audience, I can feel very viewed in a certain way, and so I think that's why I like to step into them as characters in the book.

Tiffany Troy: Why the title, The Animal Indoors? Why did you choose the title and how does it help the reader read your poem?

Carly Inghram: I find titling fairly tricky and it’s funny because identity can largely feel a little funny sometimes too. Sometimes the way I title individual poems will have nothing to do with the poem itself. I find titling a larger body of work tricky because I don’t think you can do the same thing. You actually have to find something that is encompassing.

Something that a friend helped me with in my other book was he read through the poems and found a poem and then used a piece of the text to create the title. I did the same thing with The Animal Indoors. I underlined different parts of the book I thought were useful or felt were most important to me at the time then tried to make titles out of them. The Animal Indoors ended up with an interesting title as we all just lived through a global pandemic.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today? Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world.

Carly Inghram: Recently I have been trying to write fiction, which has been fun. I’m going to see how it goes.

I have a friend of my brother’s who writes music and he shared his album. I was listening to his album and he very honestly shared his whole story. That’s very beautiful. I think there’s power in stories and sharing our stories. Our not as an exclusive our, but I think everyone sharing their stories is very freeing. So I wish everyone can share their story.