José Felipe Alvergue is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017). A graduate of both the Buffalo Poetics and Calarts
Writing Programs, he teaches and lives in Wisconsin.
1 - How did your first book
change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How
does it feel different?
I suppose
that depends on what I consider my first book. I’ve moved recently and had to
take stock of old things I might throw out and came across some very old
projects. One in particular reminded me of a chapbook I made back in the early
2000s. I’d taken a video camera and walked down a particularly busy street in
my hometown, San Ysidro. I remember taking the footage and drawing portraits of
faces and then writing short prose/poetry pieces. Really just descriptive
passages of place and person. If that were my first book I’d think that it
changed me by revealing new ways of envisioning a politics. I’d been a
political theory major in undergrad and I’d planned on becoming involved with
both law and later politics, but writing offered me something that a life in
politics wouldn’t have, which is a sort of immediate availability to the
symbols through which politics becomes ‘the political’ identity of a group,
nation, community, etc. I think I’ve been tracking this throughout. Even with
my last book before precis (gist : rift : drift : bloom). On the
surface it’s described as a book on the last wild passenger pigeon, but it’s
also about gun law, space, and the religio-moral impressions left behind by the
various cultures that have settled the Midwest, and their etymologies. I’d say precis feels different in the stability
of readership that comes with the publisher. Omnidawn is an amazing press and
they work very hard to promote both their authors, but more importantly poetry.
And poetry as a plural and diverse poetics at a moment when commodification
puts a lot of pressure on various art forms to accommodate to the consumer. I
feel like I’m part of a larger community than I’ve ever really been a member of
before.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I
remember two impactful events. First, reading Leaves of Grass in a political theory course taught by Tracy
Strong––I remember reading it at Monument Park, which is a park at the border
wall where it recedes into the ocean (where I did most of my reading for school
while in college). And second, I remember becoming acquainted with the Taco Shop Poets in San Diego and getting involved in local projects, meeting artists
and poets. Even then, however, I understood poetry to be about story telling,
even if in a performatic, or non-fictive disclosure. In fact before writing
mostly poetry I’d been writing sort of macabre short stories all taking place
at the border––both as an actual geography and imagined space. So it’s not so
much that I don’t see genre. I do and I think genre is important in many ways,
but the boundaries are more porous than we, culturally, recognize. In short, I
came to poetry later, but even while writing short fiction, I was I think
already writing poetry throughout the syntax and movement of the pieces. I
realize now that my MFA advisor, a novelist (Steve Erickson) might’ve been
telling me all along to try poetry more concertedly.
3 - How long does it take
to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I
wouldn’t be able to say one way or another as all of my projects have had
different lifespans. I start with research and sometimes this takes a long
time, sometimes it takes less time. Then the writing. After, sometimes during,
also the arranging. I don’t writ- discrete poems. I work on sustained projects
that are from the beginning a ‘whole’ so I think the most time-consuming aspect
of how I work is the arranging––the making it all into a book so to speak.
4 - Where does a
poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up
combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from
the very beginning?
Definitely
the latter.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
For a
short period I became really invested in performance art. It was a way of
interrogating terms I was also writing about critically, like ‘the body’ or
‘space’, ‘becoming’, etc. So a lot of my work involved my body and temporality rather
directly. My readings now continue to think about the relationships between
language and embodiment I suppose, and they have involved different
interruptions to sonoricity, space, breath. I’d say that I enjoy doing only a few
readings because they take a lot from me and each one is very specific. I read
differently each time. I basically re-compose or re-arrange the work so that I
truly feel like I’m performing the initial response of the poetry each and
every time.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I have
many. I try not to distinguish between scholarship and poetics, though
obviously there are many important distinctions. But my questions pertaining to
voice, place, and personhood are always coming from the same place of my
experiences with politics, diaspora, alienation, and force.
7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one?
What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think
writing is essential now. Communication is essential and relevant. The problem
I think is that we don’t tend to value communication in the moment––as a wide
community––yet later we orient ourselves to lasting words and sometimes even
make national holidays commemorating their events. I hope that contemporary communicators
can change this and we should be open to how communicators use media, for
instance, to interrupt the temporality within which intimacy becomes public.
Some problems that I see, especially in academia, is a distance between
thinking and the community. But this movement towards the public humanities
offers an opportunity to re-work the affective binds between what takes place
in the classroom and what takes place outside the classroom. We need to “feel
(for) each other” as Fred Moten and Stephano Harney write in The Undercommons,
and by this I mean to both invest in the reality of the theoretical discourses
we create, while permitting ‘the real’ world to trust in the intellectual labor
of clarifying authentic histories from the fabricated narratives meant to gloss
over historical reality.
8 - Do you find the process
of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think
it’s great because they see or hear what I miss. And they’re invested in
aspects of the poetic that as a writer I can sometimes miss while being so
focused on certain parts of the project. Gillian Hamel was my hero at Omnidawn
in this regard.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I don’t
know about best––I think anything that inspires work is good. Though I think
the worst advice I often hear poets give creative writing students is that
poetry isn’t about ideas. It’s always about ideas. Even if this is not what we
mean when we say it to students, we shouldn’t really say it so carelessly in
that it’s utterly not true.
10 - How easy has it been
for you to move between text and performance? What do you see as the appeal?
See 5. As
for appeal I don’t know. It’s a fairly old tradition I think and at many points
in literary history readings have signaled the emergence of Community. I think
a cool trend that’s come back are house readings. David Hadbawnik
re-invigorated this practice in Buffalo while he was there, and Jordan Dunn and
Andy Gricevich run a series in Madison called Oscar Presents. I think the
appeal of house readings is more authentic for me than bookstore readings, or
things of that nature. Then there’s the collaborative events Susan Howe and
David Grubbs have been doing, or Cecilia Vicuña readings that disrupt what
readings are or have been in many ways. Different readings have different
appeals I guess is what I’m saying. What I don’t like are readings that are
just sort of impersonal, industry-necessary readings. I think also the kind of
stuff Douglas Kearney has been doing for a while, which might explain his turn
to experimental opera now, has also pushed out a new space for performance/text
to explore each other.
11 - What kind of writing
routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day
(for you) begin?
My day
begins with changing diapers, making breakfast, dancing, and singing songs to
my child. My routine now is about letting go. Treating time in a less
compartmentalized fashion and being present where I am needed by someone else
for however long that takes. I’ve been working on a project from my research on
casta paintings and casta in general throughout Latin
America, and it started before the birth of my son, and from me thinking about
his being biracial in America today. So my being present for him I think is an
extension of the thinking I was doing in his prenatal absence (though he’s
always been present as an extension of his mother’s body). My present as
unconditional love is now the impossibility of writing from the same or towards
the same unconditionability of love despite the over-conditioning obligation of
position, race, body, labor, colonialism, etc. While I haven’t written as much
as I’d like to have written, I’ve felt the project in a way that I hadn’t
realized I should be during the time when I was mostly writing.
12 - When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
Netflix.
13 - What fragrance reminds
you of home?
Contaminated
water. Seriously. Rotten beach smell, and onion fields.
14 - David W. McFadden once
said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence
your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Always
the natural world. But in terms of books, Jean Toomer’s Cane and Theresa Cha’s Dictée
are books I teach and think about often. I listen to a lot of music, and a
lot of different genres and styles at different stages of writing––reading,
composing, revising, etc. From son jarocho to EDM, Argentinian and Mexican
punk/ska core to Kendrick Lamar, musique
concrete, opera, Richard Skelton, post-rock, and so on. Different tempos
are conducive to different moments of thought I think.
15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
See above
I suppose.
16 - What would you like to
do that you haven't yet done?
Write.
17 - If you could pick any
other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you
think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I like
observing so maybe something observational/conjectural, like a sort of animal
biology (though I don’t like extreme temperatures so it would have to be of a
rather uninteresting species).
18 - What made you write,
as opposed to doing something else?
An
urgency to draw attention to, to understand for myself, to regain myself from
capitalistic and nationalistic obligations to give away my self.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
20 - What are you currently
working on?
I’m working on
something that explores the racialized/sexualized body, land, and the emergence
of civil laws pertaining to the governance of boundaries between them I’m
calling casta for now. It started
from looking into and teaching casta
paintings in my classes, and from a collection of ekphrastic poems I had lying
around related to baroque paintings I’ve had the opportunity to stand in front
of throughout the years.
