Betwixt and Between: An Interview with Brenda Cárdenas

“And somebody might say, well how is that Latino? Or Latina, Latinx, whatever word you want to use — well, it’s coming out of this body!”

Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Trace (Red Hen Press), Boomerang (Bilingual Press) and three chapbooks, including From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press). She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry; POETRY; TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing; Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and many others. With the band Sonido Ink(quieto), she recorded the spoken word and music CD Chicano, Illnoize: The Blue Island Sessions. She has served as faculty for the CantoMundo writers’ retreat (2021) and as Milwaukee Poet Laureate (2010–2012). She currently teaches Creative Writing and U.S. Latinx Literatures at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Alright, so to start off, one of the reasons I’m very excited I got to interview you is because I actually live in Michigan.

Oh!

Yeah! It was interesting, I saw that you got your MFA at U of M [University of Michigan] and that you teach in Milwaukee now, correct?

Yes. And I’m actually from Milwaukee. I grew up in Milwaukee, and then I lived in Michigan during my MFA. But also after that I stayed and taught for a while. I was there for five years I think. And then I lived in Chicago for eight years and then moved back to Milwaukee. So, I’ve been in the Midwest forever.

I was gonna say, so just all over the Midwest! I love it.

Yes, all over the Midwest!

Yeah, because that was one of the things I was very interested in, obviously because I live here, and I could see it playing a role in your work as well. You helped edit Between the Heart and the Land, a collection of poems all about Latina poets in the Midwest, and even in your other books, how has growing up in the Midwest played a role in your work? Whether it’s through nature, your childhood, upbringing, culture, how has all of that played a role in your poetry?

Yeah. I think it’s interesting because, culturally, Mexicans in the United States — and I call myself Mexican-American or Chicana — are already betwixt and between Mexican culture and United States culture. Even within Mexico one is between the Spanish conqueror and the indigenous people, colonizer and colonized in one body. So it’s interesting also to be in the Midwest, again, between!

Very true!

Between coasts, right? And I think that my work in many different ways does have a lot to do with those kinds of hybrid spaces or liminal spaces. Like the coming together of languages. I write poems in English, but I also write poems that code-switch between English and Spanish. So that is one kind of hybridity. I love the other arts too, so I’ve done a number of projects with dancers, musicians, composers, and visual artists. I often write poems in response to visual art, so that’s another kind of hybridity. I think also wherever you’re from, if the landscape or the weather is, you know, extreme or significant in some way, that’s going to play a role. Our weather is certainly extreme!

That’s for sure! Oh yeah.

Wisconsin, right! I mean, I’ve never sat down and actually counted the number of references to snow in my poems, but I know there are many. And the landscape is odd; you don’t usually see that with Mexican-American writers because so many are in the southwest or in California. So they tend to write about desert landscapes or warmer climates. And here I am in the snow. Autumn plays a big role, too. I do love the change of seasons — having the four seasons. I wish we didn’t have so much winter though. But I’m very accustomed to that. And also urban landscapes; Milwaukee is a small city. It’s kind of comparable to Pittsburgh if you took the hills away. It’s not a major city, but it’s still a city. And I spent a lot of time living in Chicago — a big city. So some of the work has the urban rhythms and landscapes in it. And I’m trying to think how else the Midwest … When I do reference family history in poems, my family that came from Mexico goes all the way back to my grandparents, and they came directly from Michoacan and Jalisco to Milwaukee, to the Midwest. And, in fact, they were coming on a train and they accidentally passed the stop for Milwaukee and ended up in Detroit. And some of them got off the train and just stayed there. So I’ve always had relatives, like the Rivera clan, in Detroit, and the rest got back on the train and came back to Milwaukee, where they were headed.

Interesting!

Yeah! So that’s just weird first of all! Not quite the typical migration story!

And I like how you touched on how you incorporate both Spanish and English in your writing. In your work, both languages are interwoven and not always necessarily translated or focused on catering to the English speaker, if you will. So I wanted to ask how this applies to your writing, if you’ve always written this way, and how you’re intentional about this?

Uh huh. I don’t know that I’ve always written that way because I’m educated completely in English, and I’m an English professor. In my very early poetry, I probably didn’t code-switch that much. And I’m talking about very early, like when I was 18, 19 years old and had never seen an example of that language mixing. I didn’t think one could do it when I was that young. But later, and it took a while because I’m old, so when I was educated in school, the curriculum wasn’t diverse at all. There were no Latinx writers that I read in high school. I read Spanish and Latin American writers in college because I was double majoring in English and Spanish. And so, you know, when you take advanced Spanish classes, it’s literature. But those were writers writing in Spanish. I never saw the code-switching until probably between undergrad and graduate school when I first discovered poets like Lorna Dee Cervantes and Lalo Delgado, Carlos Cumpían, Carlos Cortez, and all these other folks, Alurista, and Demetria Martinez. There were a whole bunch of poets that I saw code-switching and then I realized, oh yeah, you can do that! And so I began, I think because I grew up in a household where I heard multiple languages all the time. And even though we spoke mostly English, Spanish was always infused into it. My father’s parents spoke very little English. And we lived in a two-flat, which I’m living in now. My aunt and uncle lived in the bottom flat, and my mom and dad rented the upper flat from my aunt and uncle. And so my dad and my aunt especially often spoke Spanish. And my aunt married a first generation immigrant from Yugoslavia. Well, it was Yugoslavia then. So, he had the Slovenian and was learning English, and he was learning Spanish along with the English just because it was in the household, you know?

Yeah.

And my mother is German, so I’m half Mexican, half German. My mother didn’t speak German though. She was several generations removed, so she spoke English. But she was also learning Spanish because of my father and my aunt. That side of the family was very large, so we were with them a lot. Everyone lived right near each other. And my uncle, who was Slovenian, actually nicknamed me Cacahuete Mantequilla Princess Red Cheeks, Cacahuete Mantequilla being peanut butter. Because I always had my fingers in the peanut butter!

Oh, nice!

Ha ha, right! You would have thought it would have been one of the Mexicans in the household who would have nicknamed me that. Instead, it was the Slovenian! Who would have guessed? I’d just walk around imitating people. I would hear my uncle and he’d be like, “I vant to go to verk.” And then my dad or my grandpa would be speaking in Spanish, and then I would imitate that. So for me, I feel like my first language was really Spanglish. It wasn’t just plain English, it wasn’t all Spanish either. It was Spanglish. And so for me, it’s natural to code-switch like that.

And so it’s fitting that your work looks like that as well, like you said, because you kind of grew up that way.

Uh huh! But then I also do it sometimes for artistic or aesthetic reasons. So I might get an inter-lingual rhyme or alliteration. Because poets, we’re always thinking about sound. And so sometimes I create interlingual alliteration or consonance by rubbing those two languages up against one another. And it’s an interesting way to play with sound. So sometimes it’s the artist in me doing that, and then sometimes it’s an expression that you really just can’t imagine in the other language. Like, it’s idiomatic or it means differently in Spanish than it would in English, or in English than it would in Spanish. So to translate it doesn’t capture it. He’s passed on now, but there was a wonderful poet named Francisco X. Alarcón who had a poem in which he said, “Un beso is not a kiss,” meaning “beso” translates to “kiss,” but the word “beso” is filled with so much more passion!

Right, it’s not the same!

And maybe it’s just associations that people have with certain words, but, you know, translation is always tricky. There’s never a true translation because languages and words are full of connotations and nuances that we can never get exactly in translation.

Right, yeah that makes sense! And I like how you mentioned that a lot of your work as a poet is working with sounds, obviously with language and placement of words. And I even noticed that visually sometimes your formatting would change in your poems. So I wanted to ask about that and what your process is of arranging the words themselves on the page?

That’s a great question. I mean, form should in some way either mirror the content, underscore the content, or further the content. So sometimes it’s as simple as, maybe I’m writing about a relationship between two people, so I put the poem in couplets to mirror that, the twos. And you could do that with any number, you know, threes, anything like that. But I think you’re referring to when the words start to become scattered on the page.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I use a number of cesuras or blank spaces. And that’s simply working with or playing with the field of the page because poetry is visual as well as sonic. Sometimes I’m doing that because I want more white space between chunks of words so you pause and breathe and take in what was said before you move on to what is going to be said, but not necessarily always through a line break. Instead, through an actual, visual blankness. And so sometimes that’s the reason I want that pause in the middle of the line. Sometimes it’s because I’m writing about something that is scattered. Also, I said I often write about visual art — sometimes I’m mimicking with the way the words are laid out on the page, the way the visual art piece looks. I tend to write a lot about earthworks and art that’s created out in the environment, so there might be something spacial about the way the art piece is set up that I’m playing with in terms of making the poem on the page carry that sense of what the piece looks like. I have a poem in Trace about being in Panamá and a giant cloud of bees coming through the town. The poem is set up like a regular poem. Everything’s left-hand adjusted until you get to the point when the bees come in. And when this giant swarm of bees flies through town, the words start swarming and moving all over to mirror the bees. Visually on the page we can push our content forward in a way that maybe the reader doesn’t even realize on the surface but takes in subconsciously. If I’m making any sense.

No, yeah! So like, every decision like that is very intentional for one reason or another.

Yeah! It’s always intentional. Sometimes the form is easier to line up with the content than other times. Other times it’s more of a feeling that, you know, this piece just needs … it needs to move.

Right. And it’s very interesting hearing you talk about the different poems you write. Like, you mentioned how you write about visual art. And in your bio it says that you’ve recorded spoken word and music for different things as well. So I wanted to ask about all the different genres you have gotten into, if you’ve mainly always started and stuck with poetry, and how you’ve branched out into those other formats?

When I was a little kid I wrote little stories, you know? But then once I found poetry — and I found poetry in high school. Even though the curriculum wasn’t diverse, I still loved Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and a few poets of color like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. And once I found poetry, I just fell in love with poetry. And I’ve been writing principally poetry since then. I do academic writing as well because I’m a professor, so I’ll write short articles about other poets or a longer article about Latinx poetics, things like that. And I’ve been interested in writing creative nonfiction — true stories, but told through a poetic lens. And so I might end up with a book of creative nonfiction down the line. But otherwise it’s always been poetry for me. I don’t ever — I should never say never — but as much as I love reading fiction, I don’t imagine myself writing it. You have to have a kind of patience and imagination that I don’t have. My fiction writer friends talk about how the characters start talking to them and telling them what to do. And I’m like… I hear lines of poetry! I don’t hear characters like that. One of the things I love about poetry is painting with words. You have to put an image on the page, right? You don’t have to; I shouldn’t state it as a rule because there’s always a poem that will come along and break those rules. But I tend to conjure an image in your mind so that when you read the line, you can see it in your mind’s eye or smell it or hear it. The senses become very important. I also love the musicality of language, and poetry pays more attention to that than any other genre. So I haven’t really done that much in terms of other genres of writing, but I’ve done a lot of inter-arts work. I worked with a dancer once where she choreographed dance to go with a poem of mine, and then we brought other elements into it and we ended up with a performance art piece that we performed in London. I’ve worked with several different composers and musicians. In fact, about a year ago, a composer wrote to me and asked if he could compose choral music to one of my poems in my first full-length book, and I said sure! And we got permission from the publisher for him to use the poem as lyrics, and then he sent me a composition. And it is so beautiful. I love it! And now it’s getting published by the largest publisher of sheet music in the U.S.

Wow!

Right! Hal Leonard. So the sheet music will have his notes and my words! And I’ve done other things like that with composers and also musicians, just jamming with musicians. I had a band for a while that was called Sonido Ink(quieto), “Restless Sound.” It was myself and another poet fronting the band, and then a whole bunch of musicians, just the opposite of choral music! The musicians came out of Punk en Español, hip-hop and rock. They would compose music to go with the poems, kind of like garage rock. And sometimes they just did soundscapey things, like playing the guitar with a lighter or a spoon. Sometimes they did all-out punk, like, I’d have to scream over the top of it. It was a whole bunch of fun, and we made our own CD, all DIY, and had a ball. I worked with a jazz fusion band a little bit once and then visual artists too with whom I’ve done mostly ekphrastic projects. My next step is to start making more visual interventions on the page. More than just scattering the language, but actually using typography and design elements that are essential to making the poem mean … like if you take the visual away, the poem falls apart.

Right.

I see myself maybe doing things like that.

That’s so cool; it’s probably such an amazing experience having other artists work with you and use your work like that.

It’s really awesome. I love visual art. I can just sit in an art museum writing poems in conversation with art all day. I did a reading once at a university where there was a young woman, not at the reading, but showing people where it was or taking tickets or something like that. And the person didn’t know who I was, and then heard me reading a poem, and came in and sat through the poem. After the reading she said, “Oh my god, I didn’t know you were the author of that poem! I painted a whole mural based on your poem!” And she started showing me pictures of this mural she painted!

That’s insane!

Right! So, you know, that kind of stuff happens. I really love collaboration. Love it. It becomes like what William Burroughs called the third mind. You have one mind, you have another mind, and when they come together and you riff off each other, you get this whole other third mind. Which is, to me, really exciting.

Aw, awesome!

And before I forget, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what work you have “in process” or are working on currently, what you’ll be talking about at the event, and how it plays a role with National Hispanic Heritage Month?

Uh huh. So, I mean, probably at the event I’ll be reading a bunch of poems from my newest book, Trace, because that just came out 2023. I’ll read a variety of different kinds of poems. And a few of them will be ekphrastic, meaning poems that are in conversation with visual art. And I’ll show slides of the visual art. I respond to artists of all different racial, ethnic, and aesthetic backgrounds, but for this event, I’ll read pieces that are in response to work by Latinx artists. I have a collage poem, meaning that I took all the language in it from other places, but just in tiny bits and pieces. It’s all made up of language from books by Native American and Mexican American authors that the Tucson public schools system took out of the schools. They virtually banned them for a time.

Really?

And then that was outlawed. They had to put them back. The ban didn’t hold, but they tried to do it. And it made me so angry that I said, okay you’re going to ban these books? Then I’m going to write a poem made only of language from these books.

There you go; they won’t be lost!

Ha ha, that was my little rebellion. So, you know, I’ll probably read some of that work. And then also what I’m working on now. I don’t have a book project yet, but I’ve been writing many new poems. I work with a women’s writers group where we meet once a week on Zoom. We just met, in fact. And we do generative writing together. So I have new stuff that starts in that group, and then I have to develop it and revise. I’ll probably pick some brand new poems and I imagine that much of what I’ll read will have to do with celebrating Latinx cultures and heritage. Perhaps in some poems I read that won’t be obvious on the surface. But I think we have to allow writers with any background to write about anything. I mean, any of us can write about a tree!

That is very true!

And somebody might say, well how is that Latino? Or Latina, Latinx, whatever word you want to use — well, it’s coming out of this body!

Exactly, yeah. That’s enough!

I think, you know, we’re all going to write about whatever moves us, and culture may be more recognizable on the surface in some work than in others.

Another question I love asking authors is if you have any specific writing process? Like any certain habits or routines? Because, like you mentioned, you’re kind of always writing, whether it’s actually for something or just with a group or for yourself. So do you have a specific routine/process or spot you go when you do sit down to write?

I need more of a routine! Because I’m not always writing. You know, you get caught up when you’re teaching and grading and planning, and the writing has to be put aside. In terms of process, I tend to write … okay, so a lot of people write on paper first. I used to. I don’t anymore. I compose right at the computer. I usually am sitting in my La-Z-Boy chair where I’m really comfortable with my laptop.

Oh yeah.

I’ve been more lately starting with word banks. Instead of a list, I tend to use a table so that it’s all little spaces of words. It might be as simple as, you know, here are some words that I really love the sound of and here are some words I really love the meaning of. Or it might be that I know that I’m going to write about a general topic or notion, so I’ll just plug the word bank with a bunch of words that speak to that topic, and then I’ll draw words from it. The word bank might get me started, it might give me a line. That word may or may not stay in the poem, but it might get me that first line, that second line. But the way that word banks are really most useful to me is they help me to come up with unusual lines. They help me to write about things that I would have probably never written about. They help me to get out of that, “Okay now I’m going to tell X story,” or “I’m going to write about X,” which can be predictable. I think we can lose the experimentation and play with language when we get too fixated on exactly where the poem is going to go before we even put our pencil to paper, so to speak. So I like to try to start … it might even be with a writing exercise, like the kind of exercises I give my students. Sometimes I do those exercises myself just to get me out of my own head and into doing something I might not have done before. But then through all that process, I might land on a project, and I’m like, okay, I know I want to do a series of poems on this. And then I’ll start to make poems that are more interconnected with one another. So lately I’ve written a few poems based on the photography of Graciela Iturbide, a Mexican photographer whose work I admire. I’ll probably do some more of those along with continuing a series of humorous, somewhat surreal, poems regarding aging — being middle-aged.

Awesome. So the last thing before we wrap up, I wanted to ask a general question about advice or things you’d say to either newer or younger writers, whether they’re aspiring or just getting into writing?

Ah, for younger writers! Well, I would say develop a practice — whatever it might be for you. I mean, everybody says, write every day. Well, that’s not practical for some people. But if you develop a practice where you promise yourself you’re going to write at least every other day, or three days per week. Or you’re going to write every day but maybe only for 15 minutes a day. Or 20 minutes a day, unless you really get into it and have the time. But just developing a practice so that you have some consistency to your writing. I think that’s important. I would also say, and I really don’t mean this to sound like an old fogey teacher, but read. Read as much as you can! Read other poets if you’re wanting to write poetry. But read fiction and nonfiction too. No matter what genre you’re writing in, read in all the genres. Because there have been studies where they have created control groups, and they’ve given one group of students all kinds of grammar exercises to do. They’ve given another group of students copious comments from the teacher on their papers. And the third group they’ve given a ton of reading to do. And it’s always the group with the extra reading that improves the most with their writing. You see what other writers are doing, that way you can see what’s been done before so that you’re not writing cliches or something that’s passé, right? You also learn tricks of craft. And go to readings and hear people too because poetry is very much an oral tradition. So I think it’s important to hear it spoken in the voices of poets who are writing it. And the other thing I would say is don’t be afraid to experiment. So what if the poem in the end doesn’t … so what if it fails? I mean, I’ve had many poems that have failed or that have never gone anywhere if we want to use a nicer term than “failed.” So don’t be afraid to experiment with approaching a poem or a story or whatever it is you’re writing in a different way than you usually do. Like I said, try some wild writing exercises. Experiment with language, putting words together in different ways than you’re used to or even than you feel comfortable doing. Because it’s when we go out of our comfort zones that we end up coming up with the freshest and most interesting stuff. And if we’re afraid to do that because, oh this won’t sound like me or this might not be grammatically correct, if we shut ourselves down too quickly and too early, then we can lose that magical, mysterious thing we might have come up with otherwise. You can always reign it in! You can always revise; that’s what revision is for. But if you come to the page with that internal editor punishing you with “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” then you never really get there.

Yeah, that is true. Because a lot of it really is internal. Where you don’t want to do something too much or you’re scared that it’s going to be awful so you overthink. And perfectionism is definitely a thing with a lot of writers, and then it’s like, you’ll just never write anything because you don’t want it to be bad or you want it to be perfect! So that is true; you have to let go of that because then you’re able to actually discover something about yourself or about your writing that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Yeah! And there are ways that you can experiment and still be yourself. I think it’s great for younger writers to imitate published writers as an exercise because you can learn all different voices and approaches that way. But ultimately, eventually, you want to be authentic in your work — to be yourself. Because when you’re trying to be another kind of poet — and we all do that; I’ve done that myself. I always feel like the poetry I love to read is so much better than what I write. The people I read, they’re doing something different than what I do, and I’m like, ah, I wish I could be that poet. But if you try to shove yourself in that box and that’s not who you are, it’s going to ring inauthentically. And I find that the poems of mine that people end up loving the most are the poems that are the most me, you know? Not the ones where I’m trying to be some other writer.

Jackie Reilly is a senior English major and Writing minor at MTSU. She plays for the women’s soccer team.