Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz

Latinx Los Ángeles. One of the main reasons the city is always praised for its diversity. Spanish peppering homes in Bell Gardens and mariachis shooting the breeze as they wait to be hired at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights.

But pay attention to the media or watch the movies and T.V. shows made by Hollywood, and it’s like the community doesn’t exist. As Chris Rock said in his 2014 Hollywood Reporter article criticizing the industry’s lack of diversity, “You’re in L.A., you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans.” It’s as if Hollywood refuses to know its own city. A willingness to ignore a community that makes up half the city’s population.

However, Latinx Angeleños, like poet Vickie Vértiz, are increasingly penning their own narratives of a lived life born here in Los Ángeles and of the community they’re from. These writers, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, use their writing to portray their loyalty and love for their community in the context of discussing social issues. This Latinx Angeleño literary tradition took hold in the 1980s, in part due to what L.A. poet Marisela Norte said about her community living on the Eastside of the L.A. River: “I don’t know why things start and stop and matter once they’re safely over that side,” the Westside, “of the bridge.” [1]

That’s why in 1982, the poetry anthology Two Hundred and One: Homenaje a la Ciudad de Los Angeles/The Latino experience in Los Angeles appeared, that focused on these long ignored voices of L.A.’s Latino/a poets. The anthology included such future heavy hitters as former L.A. Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, Victor Ville, Marisela Norte and Helena Maria Viramontes. [2]

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Vickie Vértiz’s second poetry collection Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press), sidesteps the glare of Hollywood and vividly focuses on her community of working class Latinxs in Southeast Los Ángeles. At the outset, the first poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous,” places the reader directly into her family and community with Amá and her uncle whose “breath is two cases of cigarettes and one/aluminum beer.” Where “Amá throws/up two dollar wine/after a pool party.” This place is where “the songs of crows/outside unspool.” However, Southeast Los Ángeles is more than just the stereotypical working class Latinx. Vértiz tells the reader not only that “my first kiss is with an uncle/comforting.” but that:

When his sons leave for the Persian Gulf  he kisses them too   and
I’m                  confused
because men never embrace around me…
I understand, then                there must be other ways to love
your children

This is what Vértiz’s collection explores, the different ways to love a person or community. One of the most personal and prevalent ways she explores, Vértiz learned from her father. She explained in an interview that “my relationship to home is…the way my father related to the family he made with my mom…that I could leave, and I should leave, and I could always come back.”[3] And in Palm Frond she periodically leaves Southeast L.A., at one point, the outset of part two, traveling to Paris and Mexico. But when Vértiz returns home, her poems retain that intimacy and socio-critical eye that illustrates that her community matters and that it matters in/to L.A., while retaining the love and empathy of a place that will always be a part of her.

In the persona poem “Don Mario” she says:

One bedroom in the city of crowded…
covered in finger filth…
In the living room, darting bullets in the dark…
Mario dreams of driving
his plump neighbor on her errands
: church first, the 99 Cent Store
Bursting with school kids

Vértiz does a powerful job of allowing the reader to experience her Southeast L.A. community through her and her fellow Latinxs as individuals, employing precise line breaks. These breaks create multiple contextualized levels of meaning, like ending with “driving” in the above poem. That evokes open freedom and possibilities before cementing Mario’s dream into a more realistic and plausible one, shaped by Mario’s reality and circumstances. Circumstances born out of a long history of neglect that Vértiz understands all too well.

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Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut also expands on Los Ángeles’ Latinx literary tradition of documentation, of giving a “historical and cultural consciousness” to a community,[4]by Vértiz including her own queer Latinx identity. This is one of those other ways to love that she tactfully alludes to in “Already My Lips Were Luminous.”

In the poem “Portrait as a Deer Hunter” Vértiz places her Latinx queerness, by again using history, in the struggle for LGBTQIA rights, including an epigraph about the famous Stonewall incident in New York. But it’s her ability, as she says in “Lover’s Letter,” “To be untranslatable” that infuses many of these poems with her compassion and certainty, that creates a refreshing queerness that’s definitely her own. Vértiz says at one point, “Today is more like summer in South Gate or/Bed-Stuy.” This is the regular everydayness of being a queer Latinx, the unnoticed and unrecorded parts of these lives that occur once the media has left.

Vértiz skillfully captures this “untranslatability” because she understands how to adeptly use poetic lines. She creates extra spaces within a line to capture the extra meanings and layers of her queerness with a verve and sincerity that lacks the typical insecurity that accompanies such a self-discovery and portrayal. These extra spaces cause these otherwise easily accessible poems to strategically pause, powerfully allowing the reader to notice and feel the extra complexities of the love and affection she has to navigate through.

As Vickie Vértiz says in the final poem, about her language—these poems—they are “My resist.” In the Latinx Angeleño literary tradition she vibrantly expands on, and brings thought provoking light to, her Southeast L.A. community. And when readers step away, a part of that light lingers inside them.

Notes

[1] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[2] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[3] Membreno, Soraya. “Fierce As Fuck: The Future of Poetry Is Brown & Queer.”Bitchmedia.org, Bitch Media, 6 Oct. 2017, 9:22am.

[4]Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

Bring Down the Little Birds: Carmen Giménez Smith On Mothering Art, Work, and Everything Else

The first thing I need to say is that after reading this book I felt like I totally needed Carmen to be my best friend. Not in a silly BFF way, but in a professional way — because it is really, really difficult to make 30-year-old life decisions (dating, marriage, children) when all I’ve got so far is an MA and one book from a small press (not that I’m complaining). Still, if I were to apply next year to PhD programs, I’d be in my mid-thirties by the time I even thought about going on the job market — and even if I did get a job, I feel like those first few not-tenured-yet years are no time to have babies. So, my first question for Carmen is below:

Molly Gaudry: What’s a woman to do?

Carmen Giménez Smith: A woman should do what she can to ensure that she achieves her ambitions, and ensure that she has agency in the world. My life often requires nips and tucks to achieve this, but I’m a much happier person than I would be if I operated under the cultural assumptions about womanhood and motherhood. I find fulfillment in the insane range of experience in my life, including my job, my creative work, my curatorial work and my mothering. I can’t say there are tried and true strategies for fulfillment though. I try not to compromise and I try to compromise. I try not to do too much and I do too much. I try to be mindful, but I am often mindless.

Ugh, but I don’t want to seem like I have some kind of answer because in so many ways, my life constantly feels precarious. At the moment, I owe two essays that I can’t seem to end, I’m waiting for an important phone call that’s stressing me out, my daughter might be coming down with a cold, my house looks like it’s been robbed and I have a lot of grading to do. I still wouldn’t trade it. I think you probably know what to do, in fact, you have a plan. When I was in my early 30s, I was a hot mess. I didn’t have a book, and I was phoning it in lifewise. I think you’re doing quite well!

MG: “Hot mess” is awesome. Also awesome is your book, and the language you use, the moments of meditation and revelation that unfold and unfold as your narrative progresses. While we’ll definitely talk about language more, I wonder if you would be willing to unpack the following excerpt for us and maybe also tell us more about these specific (or abstract) dreams:

“The days divided into two: working and mothering. The third part, which is me, lives in my dreams.”

CGS: I think there’s a weird thing that happens to time when you don’t have much time to yourself. I feel like I’m constantly writing and thinking about writing throughout the day, and that’s the third part of my day, and it’s simultaneous.

MG: What role do notebooks play in your daily “writing and thinking about writing”? And when did you start keeping them?

CGS:  I have tons of notebooks, and I use them a lot. I started keeping them about ten years ago. I write whatever comes to my mind and I do a lot of revision in them, but I also write directions and to do lists and recipes in them, so they don’t have any clear narrative or system at work. In fact, I carry three notebooks at a time, so I’m often digging around looking for where I wrote something down. The reason I carry three is that they each have a nature or a quality. I guess I don’t want to not write something down if the notebook isn’t right for it. Unfortunately, that’s not the weirdest thing about me.

MG: Structurally, your book reminds me of Carole Maso’s AVA. I’m interested to know what books or writers influenced, inspired, or otherwise impacted Bring Down the Little Birds. 

CGS: I love Carole Maso, and I think she probably was in the backdrop of influence, but also Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, Lia Purpura’s Increase, Jenny Boully’s The Body and John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame. Another big influence was Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. Her frankness about the complex feelings she had about her mothering gave me the courage to really put it all out there.

I read so many books about mothers, mothering, but every book that I read ended up through the filter of my mothering, of the book. I have pages and pages of notes from other texts that I read at the time that didn’t make it into the book.

The book started as a lyric essay, my first real attempt, and I realized that I wanted to keep going with it, and I wanted to write about my mom and everything she was going through. The book was very much written in the moment, so it was cathartic. I had notebooks and notebooks of stuff that I thought might end up in the book. I have a file on my computer called “Mothering Fragments (the original title of the book) Orphans,” and its pages of passages that I cut out of the book.

At a certain point, I began to juggle the different fragments so that there was resonance within the shorter moments and in order to create more chronology and more arc. The idea for the imaginary notebooks was a suggestion from both my husband and from Kevin McIlvoy.

I learned a lot about structure writing that book, and there are a few things I’d have done differently, but I suppose that’s the life of a writer. I’ll do it better the next time.

MG: Can we talk about lyric essays? It seems that they’re a sort of hybrid form, in that they are both poetry and essay. Do you consider yourself a poet mostly? Will you write more lyric essays in the future? 

CGS: I’m at work on a couple of projects with a lyric essay component, although I’m also trying my hand at straight NF. I’m trained as a poet, so I think of myself primarily as a poet with a deep curiosity and respect for what can happen in NF. When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist, and I got derailed into this stuff!

One of the books I’m working on is about television and the other is about failure. There’s a lot of intersection there. I also want to write about body weight, like an Arcades Project about fat asses, but that’s in the conception phase.

MG: What about the structure? What did you learn? Or, what did this book teach you about structure that your previous titles didn’t? 

CGS: Bring Down the Little Birds was the first book with a large-scale structure I had to deal with, and after I wrote it, I was able to return to a book of linked poems that I had been working on for ages and knew a lot more about how to order it.  I can’t describe exactly what it is I learned except maybe being very aware of how a writer gives and withholds and how this pattern can be really exciting and dynamic. The first book I wrote was a collection of poems, and I really relied on other people to help me order it, but BDTLB was such a huge undertaking, I really had to do a lot of the work on my own. I had to learn to define what felt instinctual so I could apply it throughout the book.

Although each book is unique, I do find myself, as I’m working on new NF books, returning to some of the strategies for writing that I used in writing BDTLB. I really resisted the fragment, but now I’m going with it because I can remember that the fragment was a great drafting strategy. I’m writing shorter passages or sections that may or may not become longer because this can be generative. And I’m trying not to worry about structure or redundancy at earlier stages, which helps me just generate, something I really struggle with.

When all is said and done, the book is chronological, a really traditional narrative form. Maybe the chronology has a little more in common with Mrs. Dalloway than with War and Peace, but by laying down that structure as a scaffold, I had latitude.

MG: You have a new book that has just been released, right? Can you tell us about it? 

CGS: My book, The City She Was, was recently published by the Center for Literary Publishing. I’ve been writing nonfiction lately and thinking a lot about the books that make a book, and The City She Was’s bibliography contains Ovid, Mandelstam, Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines, Grimms’ fairy tales, Francesca Woodman and Allen Ginsberg. The book began as an homage to Ovid’s poems of exile. Later, I began to think about an exile within an exile, about what living in a city can be like and how much I miss living in the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, so it’s a bit of a love poem to home.

I just received the galleys for my next book, which won the Juniper Prize last year. It’s called Goodbye, Flicker, and I’d been working on the book for ten years before I sent it out, so it’s surreal to see it finally come together. University of Massachusetts brings it out in April of this year.

MG: What’s next for you? 

CGS: Right now, I’m working on two nonfiction projects, a collection of essays (many of them about squander and decision theory) and another one about TV. Poetrywise, I’m working on a final draft for a book of poems University of Arizona is publishing in 2013, a bit of a tribute to second wave feminism called Gender Fables. I’m also starting a new book about memory and family, and Alzheimer’s.