TRANSLANGUAGING EVENT
An OS [re:con]versation with Steven Alvarez, author of MANHATITLÁN
[Editor’s note: Alvarez’s novel-in-verse Manhatitlán is currently available for pre-order — order your copy here!]
Greetings! Thank you for talking to us about your process today! Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
Steven Alvarez, gentleman & scholar, Dedalus in slouch, Quetzalcoatl in jumpsuit. Born and raised in Safford, Arizona, currently living in New York City — which is more or less the exact opposite of everything I knew growing up.
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
The “why” of the question leads to a story. This is a story about how we come to know ourselves as writers. It’s taken me a long time — first — to even admit that I’m a poet. It’s something I’ve never really been able to do. Not that I had any shame, or anything like that. On the contrary, I never considered myself worthy of the esteem I have for poets, “real” poets, people who are true to the poetry community and the craft in time, dedication, patience, and trust. I’ve thought of myself as more like a “poet in process.” It was sort of like a camino and one day I would hope to get there — one day, at last.
And, yes, I call myself a poet now . . . sometimes.
More often than not, let’s put it that way. But also understanding that the process is lifelong, and all poets are always in process, always growing.
To think back to when I first started writing, I was writing a lot of stuff when I was in my late teens and twenties, and I didn’t know the value of what I was doing, but I was learning and growing through practicing poetry. Yet all of it was similar — thinking about who I was, being from the borderlands — Mexicano — growing up in a Mormon neighborhood in rural Arizona, gente in my life, and times and places that meant something to me, all confluences of my social identity, which I think I was individualizing, as we all do — social circumstances transformed into verses. Of course there are the stories that resonate from previous generations, from our communities, and learning about those aspects of our identities, and then also developing various intersections of our identities with different folks: our racial identities, gender identities, class identities, and on. This all goes to say, I really didn’t know what I was doing when I started. I simply wrote — never calling myself a poet publically, but thinking so in private.
Later, going to college really opened things for me. I’m a first-generation college student, now PhD and profe, but the privilege of going to college and my growth marked my poetry. And in college, much of what I understood of my identities and how I could write began to bubble. See, my parents didn’t have those opportunities, but I had the opportunity to go to college and the luxury, really, the privilege to encounter a lot of this stuff that jettisoned me into a different world from where I grew up in little Safford, Arizona (population around 9,500 folks). A lot of this stuff was never necessarily in the classes I took too — it was stuff that I read in class and then I realized, “I could find the books on my own” without having to have an assignment in front of me. And then the reading really took over. And I kept writing alongside, but I never took publishing seriously because even contests and things I tried to submit to, I always got rejected. So that was something I always just . . . I just wrote and rejection came with the territory. And in that story, or the process of me becoming a poet, I’ve understood that my writing, because it is difficult, would mark my journey as a long one.
When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/ feel are more accurate)?
I tell this to my students all the time but, you know, it’s something else where even though I knew I wasn’t getting published, but I knew that what I was doing felt right based on the stuff I was reading. I started exploring a lot of different writing, particularly small press journals that were coming out. I had found the poetry journals at a bookstore, then I realized I could look for them in the library, and, fortunately for me, at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. I used to spend a lot of time there, and the main campus library. And finding different writers and in literature classes and being introduced to literature by anthologies, still reading folks like Stein and Beckett and then later finding out they both wrote whole shelves of stuff. For Beckett, for example, I found his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and I was like “Wow! It’s not only Waiting for Godot. He has this whole body of work that — he evolves over time as well.” And especially how he has navigated, for example, French and English . . . I started to soak it all up.
Pure joy!
But, all the same, it happened that going to school really opened me up to thinking about how different writers thought about their own identities, then how mythology, history, and politics especially shaped some of the folks during High Modernism — particularly Joyce and Pound. But then also, thinking of a decolonial framework, especially of the Americas — and I think about the Americas as distinct from Europe — and the rich mythologies here, and as I grew older, and was able to spend more time with and reconnect with family in Mexico — that’s when the Mexican mythological traditions really took over in my writing. Of course finding works by Gloria Anzaldúa helped, and the work of Miguel León-Portilla. Then, I kind of never looked back. And it’s been a good thing. So I guess — you know, I speak about aging — it’s the younger person who was first excited about writing and was trying to figure out what was going on, and then there were some stages where I had an opportunity to learn more about myself and be reflective and think about writing again.
As I’ve grown older — pues puro viejito, verdad? — I’ve been really thinking about the political aspects and the aspects of bilingualism and power related to that, so it’s still going, I’m still growing, and the story continues. But I’m also happy I’m getting less rejection notes — I mean, still plenty, don’t get me wrong. But now I get invitations for stuff, and it’s amazing. A lot of this stuff that I had written that had been rejected for so many years is only now coming to life. That’s pretty cool for me because way back when, I think I knew my time would come. I reckon I still think that, verdad?
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
To be honest, writing poems that stand alone as literary is not my role. I can contest what that means and how texts’ meanings shift with time, but my belief for myself is to write from my heart, which sounds less theoretical than it truly is. A radical poetic sensibility must be grounded in love and care, for the craft, for language, and for poetry’s resonance as expression of cultural genius. It’s the soundsense of poetry, for me, that unlocks the artform’s lyrical elements, the potential for musicality and narrative. The lyrics of translingual poetics, though, mixes sonic-systems. There’s more intense translanguaging that can move into puns, play, and games, and with story, translingual lyricism is artful, historical, and always cultural.
Ostensibly, I guess we write for readers — but I don’t know if I ever really asked myself, “What do I want to get out of it?” Maybe now — I’ve thought about it in the back of my mind — but it sort of reminds me of the elevator speech academics have to learn to speak about their projects: “Try to describe a project that you’ve been working on for a long time and put it in a few words.” Folks doing research know, it can be a tough thing to do, because you put so much of who you are and it’s in the hands of interpretation. But I would say that what I try to present is a kind of a way of thinking about the mythologies of the Americas, some of the politics that affect people of color — Latinx gente in this country — and have historically.
Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing or making specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written / the work was being made? How or how not?
My poetry is narrative-driven by and large, and no doubt history is always the building blocks of story, or perhaps even more to the point, toward a style and method of ethnopoetics. Poets like Dennis Tedlock and Ernesto Cardenal. As I became an ethnographer exploring the history of Mexican folks in the US, in my research in literacy studies, and also educational research about writing, I have learned that writing poetry is a weaving of tales, of verses, of prosodies, and rhythms, and most certainly a translanguaging event. Translanguaging is the movement across and between language systems, and in my work, a translingual poetics is my way of understanding how languages try to own one another, and how the play of language can create translingual games, while also trying to move a story of histories.
Recently, I felt compelled to return to Robert Browning, to some of his more famous monologue poems. These monologues are direct addresses to someone listening, so they’re sort of distinct one-sided dialogues. But there’s definitely one voice that’s really strong, and impersonation, and really positioning a poet’s voice somehow as a storyteller — that is, a performance, a knowing performance…of being in performance. The monologue sets up the context, tells the story, and then pushes on with the characterization of the voice. See, for some reason I keep coming back to stand-up comedy when thinking about this kind of one-sided dialogue. There’s a really famous routine of Bob Newhart being on the telephone, and it’s brilliant.
He’s telling a story on the phone with somebody else and the audience eavesdrops on the conversation, but also participates in the dialogue through the reconstruction of the missing voice. That is, you can’t actually hear the other side of the conversation, the person on the other end of the line. It’s one side the audience hears, but it’s also the implication that it’s a dialogue. You don’t hear the other side of the dialogue, but you play it in your mind, and you have this interactive experience from the hole in the text. Robert Browning’s monologues are like this, absent voices circulating in the periphery of the poem.
This notion of circulation goes back to what I mentioned earlier when I described being born into a context, the context we occupy as voices surround us, circulate around us. I had a lot of voices I’d hear when I was writing, and I think that seeing different artists who were able to manipulate the voices and impersonate others was really interesting. To really take on and embody the music of another. That really struck me and also knowing as I moved to different places in my life, more knowledge about my own accent or accents I have, so I guess that’s my own voice in relation to other voices. And it was always this kind of sense where I could hear words, but also there were elements of registers, harmonies, rhythms, and syncopations. Like how Mexicanos speak melodious Spanish, pues. And of course these days I live in New York City — in Queens, the most linguistically diverse place on the planet, so I can’t help but appreciate what I hear with the poetry of all the borough’s voices — and not even in art forms, but in everyday life. It comes when languages combine and collide as well. So on one hand, it’s about impersonation, but also I think it’s about power or how our personalities are structured and conflicted by the languages we come into contact with, because a lot of this has to do with power or dynamics between languages. So in my poems, when I use a very didactic standardized English, it contrasts with when I use different languages in relation or combination, or even conflict. I get the same sense with your poems as well — particularly in the movement between verse and prose, and across languages as well. I think there’s a sense where as we have the embodiment of different voices it also leads to the way we can mask language and really maximize its potential across languages and musics.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
The page is a performance, and I don’t mean simply projective verse. I mean with graphic design at every level as performing for the page. Really, before I read folks like Charles Olson, don’t get me wrong. But what really hit me was concrete poetry. And that also falls under my time at the University of Arizona. I was taking an upper-division undergrad literary theory course, and the very first day — you know, sometimes you teach the first day of the college class and you have to have some kind of quick activity to do after you do roll and the syllabus. Some teachers say, you know, “That’s a pain,” but some other professors want to do some kind of activity to introduce the students to the themes of the course. So the profe brought us some concrete poetry for the first day, photocopies of works from An Anthology of Concrete Poetry edited by Emmett Williams. Well, I’d never seen that stuff before — I was like, “Oh, whoa!” And the lesson was, “Is this literature?” That was the question we had to discuss as groups and a class. And I had — I guess I was really infatuated at that time with folks like some of the Romantic poets because I thought they broke all the conventions, and they were so cool. I didn’t even know folks like the modernists yet. Once I encountered folks like William Blake — see you’re a fan too — I just kind of stuck with him for a long time — and then started moving on slowly. So here we were, with this visual literature, and a kind of literature that some of my classmates had reservations calling literature.
Right after class, I headed right over to the library to see what else I could find out about this kind of concrete poetry stuff. When I got to the library, I found more about this category called visual poetry, so I checked out as many books as I could carry. I started messing with stuff then, and I found folks like Apollinaire and Ian Hamilton Finlay in Europe, and the hermanos Augusto and Haroldo de Campos in Latin America, and the ways their poems performed on the page set my imagination on fire. Anyway — when I read aloud, however, I do perform the poems. I’ve noticed this because this is only something recent, that I’ve been asked to read poems. That never really happened before. I hear the poems in my mind and I hear the different voices and I perform the voices. There are places when I shout, and places when I speak softer, the accents that I’m able to do. So the performance then is in the registers I use as well. There are points where I — you know, I hear better the sense through the rhythms and embody some of the rhythms gives me a way, a feeling, a kind of musical connection — a harmonizing.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
The sense of narrative in fragments has intrigued me since I read serial books growing up, with the same places and characters continuing among interlocked stories. Story is what drives or motivates my poetics, but the serial aspect has fueled my imagining of histories sculpted in sequences, artfully arranged. There are a few poems in Manhatitlan that can stand alone, but for the project which has extended across a few books, I can say that the sense of a single epic was what I considered, a life’s work I would add to, something like Pound’s The Cantos. But the story was always going to have to be there, and it seems more and more these days that the story, for all that work, has not been what I’ve written more of as of late. With all that, though, I still have pages of that older work that continue to build up this world.
What does this particular work represent to you as indicative of your method/creative practice? your history, your mission, intentions, hopes and/or plans?
A lot of the work in Manhatitlan is stuff I wrote when I was in my early twenties. I’m pushing forty now. So I still appreciate that stuff and I still go back to it, but it took me that long to publish some of this stuff I wrote way back when. I have way more that’s only slowly coming out — this bigger project… That sort of was a sample of around a 500, 600 page project —
I think the aspects of idioms and languages coming into contact is inherent in all verse. I come to this from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin mostly, but I have to admit that as I get older, I always go back to James Joyce. And for this point in my life when I wrote this work (again, some of it from about ten or more years back), I was thinking this a something like a Chicanx Dedalus in Mesoamerican time. Instead of belonging to a European tradition of Greek mythology, this Dedalus belongs to this hemisphere and is distinctly rooted in Mesoamerican mythology. The languages in contact are uprooted, defamiliarized, poeticized, but considering the music of languages in contact, these voices fill the voices of different voices in their own words and rhythms.
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?
I’ll answer that by pointing to the figures in this book, as each book does different things, and I can speak what I think this one does, but really focusing on the character Chaley Chastitellez.
Chaley is the Dedalus figure that I wanted to be in this epic, the Telemachus figure, but in these works he is a certain melding of gods, including Mesoamerican gods like Quetzalcoatl, and he is sometimes manifested as Moctezuma. In other forms, he represents the conquistador Jesus, embodying those missionaries who went to the Americas, or the evangelist Billy Graham in The Codex Mojaodicus. Chaley is a kind of figure that wears multiple faces from history. There is play with archetype no doubt, and also with epic time and story modes. There are also female figures like Guadalupe, Coatlicue, Marina, Santa Muerte, and La Llorona.
But to return to Chaley, as a figure, I envisioned him to be the Dedalus that starts in Portrait and ends in Ulysses, but Finnegans Wake might be the closer model to what I wanted to write. And then I read The Maximus Poems and Charles Olson got me to think about place and time through the consciousness of a character, something I think William Carlos Williams’s Paterson also did for me too. My sense of translingual poetics and seriality directly came from studying this model.
As for Chaley’s adventures, they are not mine, but gathered from stories I’ve read about, imagined, and heard from different people on both sides of the border. I’ve met a long line of storytellers along the way, and I’ve often been transported by their words to different places where I meet gente I can imagine and seem to know. Chaley has those experiences of being both mythic and everyday, but the borderlands and its conflicts are part of his experience navigating the borderlands. With that shared aspect of my life with his, I can identify how this happens in language, home, and family. His name is also a play on language, either as chalé, which in Chicanx Spanish translates to something like “no way”, or as échale, which translates to “go get it”. But the last name, Chastitellez, is something like “chastity”, except the -ez functions similarly to the -son suffix in English, as a patronymic surname in Spanish. So the name has numerous allegorical meanings.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
I mentioned before that I have a lot of work, and I think the collected work that is similar to this book and others is close to about 700 pages. Someday I hope to publish the entire work, because then I could hopefully get more attention to my new poetry, that further explores these aspects of ethnopoetics, voices in collision, border politics, and policing. I sense a Deleuzian way of considering the body without organs in what you mention. I think I was also hoping to create a context, place, characters, and, generally, a poetic story in series. Yet, I have only really edited the older stuff for these poems now.
My hopes in the future is that I will learn more from “true” poets, and, perhaps, learn further about craft from those who have been more engulfed in these conversions as community, rather than in the isolation I have felt as a poetry for many years,
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. How does your process, practice, or work otherwise interface with these conditions?
I came to Olson through a professor at the CUNY Grad Center I studied with, Ammiel Alcalay. Ammiel has been one of my poetry mentors, and he was also on my dissertation committee way back when. He taught Olson, all of Olson, and that’s where I read Maximus. That kind of book gave me a lot to think about concerning the visual, the lyric, seriality, and ethnopoetics. I wish I could say that Cardenal influenced the ethnopoetic movements in Manhatitlan and The Codex Mojaodivud, but that would not be the case. Cardenal’s documentary poetics have been a bigger influence in some of my more recent work, where I work with transcripts and transcribing poetic units. The influence of Tedlock and Olson, but also Paterson became the backbone for my understanding of how fieldwork data collection can become a poetic system. The poeticizing is the arrangement of the findings, the putting together of the chance operations, with the translingual sculpting. I think reading Anne Waldman’s Iovis and Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger were the final touches that really influenced the poetics of the Codex Mojaodicus and Manhatitlan.
And I have to return to Safford, because even when I left, I never did.
Safford, that’s where I was born, and where I lived for 18 years. Then in Tucson for another five before leaving Arizona. Safford was a time of life when I was thinking of myself as a writer, but not always in earnest. It was Safford where I learned to read, to write, and where I learned that I could do things with words, which I hadn’t really noticed before. It was Tucson, however, at the University of Arizona, where I met lifelong mentors, and where I discovered myself as a poet and writer. But most importantly as a reader. Tucson helped me to think through Safford, and moving away from Arizona got me to think more about how AZ shaped me. And in thinking of this, Tucson came to represent what I think of when I think of AZ, as the borderlands, and what this part of the USA has become over time. Tucson and nearby Tubac are among the oldest cities in the nation, and the history of peoples, conquests, wars, and ecologies are quite rich, and also geologically epic in scope. Tucson is something like Olson’s Gloucester, but I tried to also link Tucson with Mexico City, Puebla, Alaska, and New York. These are hemispheric networks that I try to move across mythologically, along with some other spaces that attempt to be simultaneous.
I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, ability, class, privilege, social/cultural background, gender, sexuality (and other identifiers) within the community as well as creating and maintaining safe spaces, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos” and/or disciplinary and/or institutional bounds?
In Manhatitlan, Amurka in my work is not a place of belonging, at least not in a sense of identifying social relationships in specific places. This definition of belonging to community is not Amurka, rather Amurka is the state that believes some people belong to others as property. This materialist perspective becomes the walled state in the work, belonging as property value of dehumanity, one that both rises with European invasion and conquest (those aliens who came in and took over the places), but also in Mesoamerican empires too. History fuses this belonging as private property historically, and we see how human property became the wealth of those without conscience as markets expanded transnationally. Amurka has historical resonances of colonial rule in guises across borders. Walls are the metonym for human property rule and concentration of wealth, power, and advantage for unfettered greed through unjust laws that only apply to those who own the most property, the laws to designate their property, and where ownership comes into contact.
Mexico is the contrast for Amurka in the Codex and Manhatitlan. It’s an imagined Mexico, but one equally wrought with a shared European colonial history that really set the groundwork for how we experience and make history today. In the book, it’s the mythic Mexico that is also Mexico afuera, whether that’s the places mentioned in the books, or on the borderlands. There are moments when a kind of mythic space happens, a kind of underworld, and in those spaces there are the more utopic moments, though there’s also the sense that those narrative moments are transrealistic, and when combined to different strands of story, they weave alternating visions of what is possible but also what has come to be. I’ve yet to mention Sesshu Foster as being a visionary who has been the biggest influence on Codex. Foster’s work in Atomik Aztex handles this transrealistic way of treating story, which I learned (alongside Olson) as foundational for treating narrative, mythology, and history.
Is there anything else we should have asked, or that you want to share?
I am grateful to the Operating System for believing in this work, in my work, and also for the comradeship, and the learning I gained.
STEVEN ALVAREZ is the author of The Codex Mojaodicus, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize. He has also authored the novels in verse The Pocho Codex and The Xicano Genome, both published by Editorial Paroxismo, and the chapbooks Tonalamatl, El Segundo’s Dream Notes (Letter [r] Press), Un/documented, Kentucky (winner of the Rusty Toque Chapbook Prize), and Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus (winner of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Poetry Prize). His work has appeared in the Best Experimental Writing, Anomaly, Asymptote, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fence, MAKE, The Offing, and Waxwing. Follow Steven on Instagram @stevenpaulalvarez and Twitter @chastitellez.
