Q&A: Local Poet Regie Cabico on Lying to Tell the Truth
Poet Regie Cabico has had a long and fruitful career in poetry and literature, but is only now publishing his first full book of poems. “A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex and other Hyperboles, Mysteries, Parables & Fantasias” just launched on November 15 from local publisher Day Eight.
Cabico grew up in the Washington, DC area, then moved back in 2006 after several years in New York City. Throughout the decades, he’s been deeply involved in DC’s literature scene, working as a teaching artist with Day Eight, as well as with the Kennedy Center Arts Education, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and more.
Days before his book launched, Cabico and 730 DC spoke about the new book, the DC literary community, and Cabico’s approach to truth.
When did you start putting the poems in this book together?
I wrote the first poems about twenty years ago. What I did then was write several five-sentence poems. The concept was to think of an object, thing, or person, something very specific, and meditate on a short story around that with surreal or dreamlike events. I called it the Twilight Series.
Then one year ago, when I did a Halloween open mic for a literary arts organization called 826DC, I read a series of these poems because they had a spooky Twilight Zone feeling. And when there was extra time to fill, I decided to also have other people write their own short poems during that event. I had the audience write the name of a famous person, a household object and a place. I collected the cards and they randomly picked a card from each category. The idea was just to tell an impossible, weird kind of story using those three images that they would select.
When it was over, I thought I should write more. There’s a practice called 30 for 30, where you write a poem every day for a month. So I decided to keep going in November and go for a full-length book collection. I’d been writing for about three decades now and I didn’t have a published full-length book. I thought I should do it, just get the book out. So I talked to Robert Bettmann of Day Eight about publishing the book, and that’s how it started. It was an exercise in simplicity and humility. It was also influenced by my work teaching elementary and middle school students, where we talk about hyperbole and exaggeration and not telling the truth.
How do you teach middle school students about hyperbole?
We would do interview questions, but they’d have to lie. What’s your name? My name is Kit Kat Candyland. Who is your mom? My mom is a tea pot. Who is your father? My father is a basketball. What did you eat for breakfast? Gorilla toenails with soy milk. I taught the same class to college students writing memoirs. When we’re talking about memoir, we have to be accurate, but sometimes we can take liberties and hyperbolize sequences for dramatic effect. Hyperbole is something we often overlook as writers and especially students who feel like they need to have a right answer. I feel like students need to have fun and to laugh. In hyperbole, you find out more about a person than if they told you the truth.
What more could you learn from a lie than the truth?
Say I ask where someone is born and they say, ‘I’m from the ocean, spawned from seaweed and Poseidon’s trident.’ Seeing that answer gives me more insight than learning they were born in Baltimore. That answer was given to me by a non-binary student. They’ve sprouted from another existence. That’s how this person identifies. I once asked an art teacher, ‘who is your son?’ and they said, ‘my son is the world!’ It’s another way of saying how much he loves his son.
The poems in this book reference several DC landmarks, like the Smithsonian, the arboretum, Dupont Comedy Club, and more. How do you bring sense of place into your work?
They’re all fairly specific. The Dupont Comedy Club poem was written because I went to Dupont Comedy Club that day. The Smithsonian poem was written after they canceled the Asian American Literature Festival in August this year, unjustly and unfairly. I read that poem on NPR. That’s probably the most political I get in this book. There’s also a poem about getting my monkeypox shot.
The one that mentions seeing Anderson Cooper at Pride Parade.
Yes. That would only happen in DC. Anderson Cooper is down the block from me because CNN is near Union Market, where I live. Some of the earlier poems reference my years in New York. But I am totally in love with DC. I owe a lot to DC for this book because of Day Eight and Robert Bettmann. He was working diligently with me up until the end.
How did you decide to work with Day Eight? How did you find them?
I’ve been working with Day Eight for many years as an arts educator, and I really love what Robert Bettman has been doing, especially since the pandemic started. As a lot of organizations stopped their programming, Day Eight has persisted to serve the community, and that’s very admirable. I’d seen all the books they’d published and wanted to have a good one-on-one with the publisher. I know Robert, we’re still friends and we like each other.
You’ve written before that you feel like poetry is like food, that it satisfies a hunger. So what hunger are you trying to satisfy? And do you feel like you’ve satisfied it?
Human connection. All poems are a kind of gospel truth, and here we are talking about lies. But I think there is a spiritual aspect to writing poetry if it’s done well. Poems, like stories, are meditations. There’s a kind of scripture, a kind of truth, and a way of trying to exist and understand all of this. Poetry is intense feeling plus imagery. The hunger is to satisfy or to hold or to envelop and to embrace the intense feelings that we might feel on a daily basis, whether that’s loss or love or infatuation. During the pandemic, writing poems on a daily basis was a way of staying alive.
Do you think that the surreal nature of your poetry helps you more easily reach those feelings?
The act of writing a poem suspends time. And there is something that calibrates the human soul with the physical world in the act of writing. But I would say that there is something that happens when we dance, when we cook, when we paint, when we draw, when we play the piano. I don’t think that it’s exclusive to writing, but I think that all of those are satisfying the soulful hunger in our everyday lives. They all justify our existence. Every painting or poem that gets written or displayed is a chance to say, ‘We’re here and this is who we are and won’t you join me in my view of the world.’
What makes DC’s literary community tick?
There is such a wonderful community of writers that exist here that keeps me going. It’s been a great base for me. When I moved back to DC in 2006, I tried to elevate spoken word and slam poetry culture. Shortly after, I co-founded Split This Rock, Split This Rock is a literary non-profit I co-founded with poets Sarah Browning and Melissa Tuckey. The goal was to create a national literary festival in DC celebrating the poetry of provocation and witness. In short, political poetry. The first festival brought Galway Kinnel, Alix Olson, Martin Espada, and Ishle Park, to name a few, and included a march to the White House. I wanted Washington, DC to be a literary home for poetry. We would host poets from those with a poetry background, such as myself as well as nationally acclaimed poets and those from around the globe. Split This Rock also became the home of the DC Youth Poetry Slam Team.
I very much immersed myself with the literature community and also the theater community in DC. It’s not just literature; we are fortunate to have many cultural riches with us. The DC Commission for the Arts has an abundance of opportunities for artists.
What’s the first step to becoming involved in this community?
Check out Day Eight, check out their programs. Take a workshop, read and go to as many open mics as possible, read your poems, meet other poets. No one is going to give you a license to be a poet. You have to say that: ‘I am a poet.’ And if that’s who you are, then everyone should know. In your apartment building, you should say, ‘Hi, my name is so and so, I’m a poet and I have a reading here. Do you want to come with me to the open mic?’ There are so many opportunities online, also. And you can go to the library, look at the poetry section, support an independent bookstore, look at the poetry shelves, buy books, find out who the poets are that you like, the poets you want to copy. Then exercise your muscle and find what you like.
And engage in as many art disciplines as possible. Drawing, painting, writing, dancing, cooking, photography: they give us windows to be fearless and to make a choice. You don’t have to be technically great. You just have to do something different. Bob Dylan doesn’t have the greatest voice, but he makes up for it with incredible lyrics. So what do you do that is uniquely you?
The following is excerpted from “A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex and other Hyperboles, Mysteries, Parables & Fantasias,” now available to order at this link.
WOODS
I am at the fairy garden
seeking fairies.
The forest informs me
that a witch trafficked
all the fairies
to a wish factory.
My crystal ball
fairy tracker
finds the fairies
spinning straw
into future stories
cranked through
a ferris wheel
feeding plot twists
to the overthinking
monster
of despair.
Regie Cabico is the first openly queer and Asian American poet to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam. He has appeared on TEDx Talk, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and NPR’s Snap Judgement. His latest collection of poetry is A Rabbit In Search of a Rolex (Day Eight, 2023).
Denise S. Robbins is an author and educator from Wisconsin living in Washington DC. Her writing has appeared in Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Chicago Review of Books, The Creative independent, and more. She teaches a workshop about climate change fiction and has a novel and story collection in the works. Learn more at www.denisesrobbins.com and sign up for her bizarre newsletter about life here.
