Featured Review: Gillian Sze’s “Panicle.” Review by Adèle Barclay.

 

Gillian Sze’s PANICLE
(Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2017, $18.95, 90 pages)
Review by Adèle Barclay

 

“Panicle” is a term from plant morphology—it refers to a branched cluster of flowers. With this in mind, Gillian Sze’s fifth full-length poetry collection Panicle announces the poet’s ever-developing relationship with form. With dynamic curiosity, the poet exhibits a studied yet sly engagement with lyric, prose poetry, ekphrasis, sonnets, and long poems.

Sze is deliberate but not constrained when it comes to her poetry—there’s savvy consideration in her voice. She knows formal rules and literary history well, but she also knows the poetic container is human-made and fallible, and that’s what is more interesting. “Calligraphy,” the inaugural poem of the collection, elucidates this self-awareness: “To write heart in our language takes only four strokes, but so much depends on the first mark. […] In calligraphy, if a stroke falters, you must begin the word all over again.” Rather than crumple under this pressure, Sze allows the poem to embody the drive towards perfection while still opening up:

At least here at my desk I can start again and write:
This is how the beginning sounds. This is my heart. Look.
At least there is that.

Initially this proclamation of “at least” seems like a resigned gesture, but through repetition, it becomes clearly generative. The speaker unblinkingly instructs us to look at the initial stroke of a character and at her heart, and the poem tasked with opening a collection flourishes while carrying the weight of its potential undoing.

Panicle is a conversational collection. Sze often constructs the poems out of quotations and ideas from modernist poetry and letters, art history, contemporary art exhibits, filmmakers. The collection is an active museum. Sze’s voice emerges distinct despite the cacophony of references because the poet deftly balances multiple currents of dialogue. Like any good interlocutor, Sze knows when to hold threads of discussion taut and when to let them loose.

For example, “Sound No 2” deploys an epigraph from German film director Werner Schroeter: “Cinema could be as intelligent and could transport as much message and image and idea as it can with sound.” Sze juxtaposes this meditation on the potency of sound in cinema with poetry’s own powerful ability to zoom in. The quotation provides a jumping off point that Sze adapts for her own project. She writes: “These are things I want to show you, like the empty pause that encircles desire. Or how Klimt knew that a woman bends her neck that far for a kiss only if she really wants it. I want to show you how quiet it gets when you’re in the company of someone who no longer loves you.” This poetic conjuring of heartbreaking silence resounds. The poem enacts an encircling desire—the wish to speak to an addressee about the broiling intense meanings embedded in familiar images and sounds:

But more than anything, I want to show you something smaller: how the smell of winter at night has the same crisp scent as the sound of the word biscuit, the touch of velum in your mouth

The desire to communicate is so strong it engenders synesthesia. Intimate meaning transcends distinct sensory categories. Perhaps this is what the speaker wants to show us—the beyondness of sense in poetry.

 

Panicle is deeply engaged with visual art—classic and contemporary. What’s refreshing about Sze’s ekphrasis is that her awe isn’t weighed down by self-effacement. Her ekphrastic poems are full of inquisition and astonishment—“This is the hand that reaches for God. / This is where you look up”—but they don’t bemoan language’s inadequacy in the face of visual representation. The poet does not surrender power to the visual realm; instead, she creates poetry playfully and defiantly in tandem with the art world. For example, “Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 01/06/11” begins:

In the nineteenth century, the romantics ran out of words. They began titling their paintings by the same name. On one wall of the museum hangs La mort de Cléopâtre. Beside it: La mort de Cléopâtre—and beside that: La mort de Cléopâtre.

Words didn’t fail the romantics—the romantics failed with words, but the poet arrives to pick up the slack: “Along the wall, Cleopatra dies, again and again, in French and Flemish.” So much of the collection is concerned with the mechanics of looking—art, film, photography. But it’s poetry that allows Sze to invert the traditional gaze. In “Proof,” the speaker articulates a desire past the camera’s own fields of vision: “There is a way I would like you always to see me when you put your camera down.” Here the speaker sees the seeing and seizes the authority between the two onlookers: “I carry a pair of suns in my head. Take a look: I want you to go blind. I want something in me to do irreparable, irreversible in you.” The poet craves the looking as well as the connection that underpins the two observers.

Sze’s explorations of perception in Panicle are also investigations into how observing connects us to stories and each other. The collection wanders through the halls of high art, not as a way to designate itself as erudite, but as a method of interrogating what visions have come before and enabling poetry to find new ways to see.

Adèle Barlcay‘s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, PRISM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 The Walrus‘ Readers’ Choice Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016) wont the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque, the Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts, and an editor at Rahlia’s Ghost Press.

This review was published in issue 15:1 Memory & Loss. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

 

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “American Harpy” by Cassidy McFadzean

American Harpy

We found a frozen river bass discarded
on the banks of the Mississippi,

its insides bruised pink, stiffened
eyes empty as gaping lips.

It was a Saturday,
Saint Valentine’s Day.

A bald eagle skimmed the water
and caught a fish in its claws.

We watched this.
The bird flew over us, stirring wind

when it dropped the thing,
scales slipping from polished talons.

Was it an accident? Was this malice?
Our neighbour Bob, who summers in Canada,

is a card-carrying member of the NRA.
A local historian of sorts, he conducts

the church choir’s lovely organ strains.
Says he recalls when the KKK

ran the only bridge across the river in Dubuque.
Isn’t that insane?—

rows of white sheets
hanging from clotheslines of neoclassical homes,

next to drying boxer briefs.
—It was the 90s.

At night, we walked past a window illuminated:
the house of the president of the university.

Bodies gathered around a dinner table,
pouring wine, discussing policies,

and we recalled students marching to the house’s entryway
when an artist placed a hooded figure

in the Old Capitol’s walkway.
If I came bearing bones, an ill-thought effigy

would I be let into the president’s foyer?
The snowbanks outside glinted with ice,

a hill so sleek with crystals
it could carry me into the river.

Inside the library, in a Heartland State,
a dozen birds-of-prey appeared

in the window behind the stage
as a man read to us his poetry.

Should art rouse us? Should it placate?
What if the eagle wasn’t bald?

It was an American Harpy:
black feathers, black beak,

the most powerful talons of any species,
its cry restricted to one screech.

It was a new emblem for this country,
A fiercer image of freedom we could follow

along the water of Mississippi
to Ferguson, to Missouri.

Cassidy McFadzean was born in Regina, earned an MFA from the University of Iowa, and currently lives in Toronto. She is the author of Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Featured Interview: Brian Henderson

Brian Henderson is a poet based in Ontario. His poem “The Incommensurate /” was the runner-up for the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017. With the deadline for this year’s Vallum Award for Poetry quickly approaching, we caught up with Brian to discuss his process and the role of poetry in today’s world. 

You were the second-prize winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017 for your poem “The Incommensurate /.” How did you feel when you found out the news?

I was surprised more than anything, and then of course delighted. What are the odds? I’d never submitted to a journal’s prize before, maybe since there are now so many of them. What would winning mean? What does winning anything mean? Who cares for more than a few minutes? Well, here I am with a small smile on my face.

I submitted for 2 reasons: I respect Vallum (you know, having appeared once before in your pages;) and especially what you folks are up to with your outreach program — and I noticed that Nicole Brossard was to be the judge, a poet for whom I have the greatest respect and who has a an eye for, and a great ability with, the glitches of language.

Tell me a little bit about “The Incommensurate /.” What ideas or thoughts generated the poem? What was your process of writing it?

There’s a fletching or two of Zeno’s arrow in the piece, a fletching of non-arrival in how language always approaches but never arrives, or the celebration of that as a continuous unfolding happening which is its own arrival. We are quite desperate to know and to have answers such that we miss what we don’t already have in mind. We run on assumptions. I’m interested in what’s on the tip of the tongue (speaking of the glitches of language), the surprise of the vanishing point. How much of our identity is a vanishing point! And it’s looking back at us–which is a weird experience for sure.

These variations of who we might be is echoed in the lines concerning love and the house — to which I’ve added another phrase (for the book coming out from Brick next year) such that it now reads:

Let’s assume love is the name of the 10000 year old spear point found in 1970 not far from where I live with my wife in a house built for someone else in 1997 on glacial outwash that tried on the disguise of a farm in 1854

And here time starts to become the driver of performance. And it is not necessarily sequential. Here meaning is innate in every thing. And so who’s place is it, really?

Every few years the old argument that “poetry is dead” will resurface, but despite the claims that poetry is irrelevant, people continue to read it and write it. What do you think is the role of poetry in the contemporary world? 

Wow. OK, a big question. To which I have no real answer. Well, there’s Auden, isn’t there? And then there’s the gigantic production of poetry — hundreds of books a year in Canada alone. But I’d have to say that there is no one role. I myself have a penchant for ostranenie, that term of Viktor Schklovsky’s championing a poetry that attempts to unsettle. And on the other hand I’m drawn to an art of meditation and of trance which unsettles by quite different means. OK, so maybe that’s it. Bewilderment. A poetry on the other side of telling, a poetry to dehabituate, to get us beside ourselves in some fashion, where words might open the sleeves of their hearts so that we might be able to see some possible ways forward for some real transformation. I say some, some — I’m so entrenched. It’s something I personally have to work on every day. We can’t fall into despair. But maybe occasionally, in exasperation, we might have some fun with cynicism. Ha. Ha ha ha.

And finally, what are you reading right now? Which poets or works have been exciting to you recently?

So reading. Yes. Lots of reading. Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Ontario (Really? Yep, really –well OK not reading exactly, but exploring — and what reading is not?); The Handbook of Contemporary Animism; What A Plant Knows; Pieces of Light.

Oh yeah, and poetry: Loved exploring Quantum Typography and Broken Light by Gary Barwin. Exciting visual poetry that opens Kabbalahistic synapses. And from the UK, another prolific poet: Rupert Loydell, especially Love Songs for an Echo and The Man Who Has Everything, who is “well situated to sabotage understanding” with masterfully collaged work. Finally, and surprisingly after all this time I’m only now discovering Yves Bonnefoy. I’ve just got The Anchor’s Long Chain translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.

Brian Henderson is a GG finalist and the author of 11 books of poetry including The Alphamiricon, a deck of visual poem cards now online. His latest is [OR] from Talonbooks. Unidentified Poetic Object is forthcoming from Brick in 2019. He is a co-editor of the Laurier Poetry Series.

You can read Brian’s poem “The Incommensurate /,” which was the runner-up for the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017, in Vallum Issue 15:1 “Memory and Loss.” 

Don’t forget to submit to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2018!
First place receive $750 and publication in the upcoming issue of Vallum. 
Our judge this year is Griffin Poetry Prize winner Liz Howard. 
Deadline: July 15th 2018 
For more information and to enter online today, visit our website. 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Incommensurate /” by Brian Henderson

 

The Incommensurate /

Though incommensurate with itself language nonetheless
Somehow shoots a few arrows into the vanishing point of things which have
come here from a great distance
Which makes it clear we have come here from a great distance or are asleep
To the future or for example the untenable proposition of flight from hollow
bones
On second thought let’s assume music streams through feathers from a great
distance
Let’s assume love is the name of the 10000 year old spear point found in 1970
not far from where I live with my wife in a house built for someone else in
1997
Let’s manage our assumptions from a great distance and understand distance
is timing leaving us beside ourselves sometimes even with laughter or maybe a
wound made of porcupine quills or with longitude because the ink with which
it’s written is time sensitive and there is no such thing as the opposite of
meaning

This poem won 2nd place in the 2017 Vallum Award for Poetry contest, judged by Nicole Brossard.

Brian Henderson is a GG finalist and the author of 11 books of poetry including The Alphamiricon, a deck of visual poem cards now online at Ubu: http://www.ubu.com/vp/Henderson.html. His latest is [OR] from Talonbooks. Unidentified Poetic Object is forthcoming from Brick in 2019. He is a co-editor of the Laurier Poetry Series, https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/L/Laurier-Poetry, and lives with his wife, Charlene Winger, in Grey Highlands Ontario.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

 

 

Featured Interview: Ali Blythe

Ali Blythe is a poet based in Vancouver. His poem “Waking in the Preceding” was the winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017. With the deadline for this year’s Vallum Award for Poetry quickly approaching, we caught up with Ali to discuss his process and the role of poetry in today’s world. 

You were the winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017 for your poem “Waking in the Preceding.” How did you feel when you found out the news?

I felt the unnameable feeling when one imagines Nicole Brossard, who judged the contest, putting a finger on one’s poem and making some susurrus of yes/oui.

Tell me a little bit about “Waking in the Preceding.” What ideas or thoughts generated the poem? What was your process of writing it?

Have you ever read Haruki Murakami? He is a writer with obsessions. To name a few: jazz bars, preparing food, people wandering into slipstream worlds they can’t escape, and cats. He has a story about a town of cats, which combines the last two.

My obsession is “things you can only get at through movement,” like poems, love, and time. My process and thoughts for “Waking in the Preceding,” which is the first poem in a new book called Hymnswitch, were generated much like the moment in the air for the desert hare who has sharply dodged the dog, then jumps over the answer to the physical reconcilement of its questioning.

Every few years the old argument that “poetry is dead” will resurface, but despite the claims that poetry is irrelevant, people continue to read it and write it. What do you think is the role of poetry in the contemporary world? 

I have recently been on the Writers Trust jury for the Dayne Ogilvie prize for emerging LGBTQ poets.

So I was sitting in my little Cat Town office being a communications professional with my boots up on my desk when my colleague, Mollie-O, asked me what I was reading. I knew she hadn’t read poetry since high school and I don’t think cared for it much then, but I tossed her Ben Ladouceur’s Otter. She opened the book to the middle and started to read. Her eyes grew big and she said “What is this? What is this?” She read a stanza or two aloud and said, ”My brain is tingling!” and, “The feeling is going down my arm!” We talked about the line unit vs the sentence unit and how they run two tracks simultaneously, connections and disconnections, and if she would read any more poems. Which she has. A couple from the most recent Vallum, actually, mine and another she had to keep closing to fight back the welling tears. Adele Graf’s “Memory.”

And finally, what are you reading right now? Which poets or works have been exciting to you recently?

I’ve been reading Anne-Marie Turza’s Slip Minute, due out with Baseline Press this fall. I have been privy to her copy 1 of 75, which I find every ounce aching, beautiful, ominous, and funny. Speaking of slipstream worlds with no escape and why would you want to anyway.

Ali Blythe is editor-in-chief of the Claremont Review, an international magazine for young writers. His first book, Twoism, was a finalist for the BC Book Awards, and he received an honour of distinction from the Writers Trust of Canada for emerging LGBTQ writers.

You can read Ali’s poem “Waking in the Preceding,” which was the winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017, in Vallum Issue 15:1 “Memory and Loss.” 

Don’t forget to submit to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2018!
First place receive $750 and publication in the upcoming issue of Vallum. 
Our judge this year is Griffin Poetry Prize winner Liz Howard. 
Deadline: July 15th 2018 
For more information and to enter online today, visit our website. 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Waking in the Preceding” by Ali Blythe

Waking in the Preceding

Hello my forever ago, don’t worry,
you won’t be reading this much longer.

You will have already returned
in the body of a snowcloud

which is suggestively, fashionably,
only ever one second old.

Yes darling, it’s me, it says as proof
that in space, though there are many

silences, fleeting isn’t the opposite
of infinite, but its perfect match.

Stanching the muscle to work it.
A memory among many I hold

is you and another death-being
drinking cold windowsill

glasses of water, causing shivers
up and down the once two-thing

we say goodbye to by slowly undressing
from the wonderful softness of our own

gendery animalia. Let’s light
the end of a candle

with another longer candle
while we drift in the old ways

like these Jovian diffusions.
Remembering, remembering

your gathering body framed
by the door I ogle daily

as part of my reality of starving
on flowers and realism.

Though not wishing to answer
anything that thrusts too readily

toward any subject, I was once
helped to choose to never again use

 I in which
I is not my first person.

Everything permutes
faster than you can imagine.

But in this kind of blindness
we will no longer surveil

we will no longer widely steer
toward avoidance, we will become

happy, satisfied and uplifted
communications professionals

like the back-of-office sunbeams
that set the cover to glow.

Contained,
not constrained, by the past.

Childhood I might enter
if I could confiscate the adult sadness.

Adulthood I might enter
if I could confiscate the childhood sadness.

Outside this type of weather
the hare sharply dodges the dog then lifts

over the answer to the physical reconcilement
of its own questioning. Are we the physics

of our dreams? The ones that keep using
sadness for erotics. That isn’t said quite right

but I think you understand.
In the movement anyhow.

 

This poem won 1st place in the Vallum Award for Poetry contest, judged by Nicole Brossard.

Ali Blythe is editor-in-chief of the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for youth. His first book of poems, Twoism (2015, icehouse poetry), was a finalist for the BC Book Awards. In 2016, Blythe received an honour of distinction from the Writers Trust of Canada for emerging LGBTQ writers. Blythe’s poems are published in literary journals and anthologies throughout Canada, and in Germany and England. He lives in Vancouver, BC.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Bathing at Peaks of Otter” by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

Bathing at Peaks of Otter 

As we speak, a sentence falls on itself
—I know how to save it,
but why? Our sense of timing

pulses like a cat’s, and the rodents
stay away. I am macabre, too.
Yes, we were young.

Yes, we bathed in a mountain lake.
Was the spring that clear? Then,
we counted a hundred stars,

and the forest hid the eyes
of animals looking to eat.
The world was still, fit, as though

time had its hand far up a tree
while we looked and admired
the pines so large, the mountain ridges

foreboding. And when we peered
into the valley, the blue vista
spilled forward like a memory

unfolding. Have you, too, held it?
There will be nothing else like it,
nothing else to compensate for.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of On the Altar of Greece, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in journals internationally, including The Dalhousie Review, Descant, Existere – Journal of Arts and Literature, The Massachusetts Review, and Vallum. Her website is www.donnajgelagotislee.com.

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Magician’s Girl” by Alexis Marie

The Magician’s Girl
from “The Carnival”

The night is our carnival.
I recognize your practiced hands,
your kind of breed,
the way fear is
intoxicating to you.

You imagine me levitating,
locked in your glass box,
my skin glittering.

You’ve brought me here
to test my reflexes.
We stand on the ledge
of a high-rise,
cars swarm the streets below
like toys on a circuit.
I don’t tremble.

The sky is our stage, we take our places in this balancing act,
you exhibit me to the night,
I’m unwrapped under neon.

Voyeur lights wink at us,
we hang on, bracing each other
for the plummet.

 

Alexis Marie earned her Master’s in Creative Writing from Oxford University in 2011. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies including The Oxonian Review, Asia Literary Review, Vallum, and Poetry is Dead. She lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Table Must Always Be Clean Before Bed” by Julie Paul

The Table Must Always Be Clean Before Bed

A pair of scissors on the table is bad fortune
Shoes or elbows on the table is bad manners
Beer bottles on the table is a bad hangover
Cat on the table is a bad cat

Crossed knives or bellows
At the table mean a bad argument
Sitting on the table tempts fate
Crossed forks at the table mean bad rumour
Dropped cutlery means a visitor
(potentially bad)

But what of crumbs and grains of rice,
And magazines and papers and crayons?
What of candles and napkins,
A toy airplane and a game of cards?

If singing at the table can make you poor,
And sleeping on it can make you unlucky, then
What about just a head, resting? What about humming instead?
What about an open book?
What about a party hat?
What about chewing gum, fingers,
The future
The past
The straight flush
The Hanged Man
The hope that tomorrow will be a better day?
How clean must this table be?

 

Julie Paul’s debut poetry collection, The Rules of the Kingdom (MQUP, 2017) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and is shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She is the author of two short fiction collections, The Jealousy Bone (Emdash, 2008) and The Pull of the Moon (Brindle & Glass, 2014). The Pull of the Moon was awarded both an IPPY award and the Victoria Book Prize and was named a Top 100 Book in The Globe and Mail. Her essay “It Not Only Rises, It Shines,” won the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award from The New Quarterly and her story “The Expansion” won The Rusty Toque’s 2016 Chapbook Award. She lives in Victoria BC, where, in addition to writing, she works as a Registered Massage Therapist.

 

To view other poems published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

 

He Didn’t Even Remember Her Being There: A Conversation with Marcela Huerta

Interview by Tess Liem

Tropico (Metatron 2017) is Marcela Huerta’s debut collection of poetry. Her book is a distinct exploration of elegy, memorial, political exile, and family history. Among other things, Tess Liem talked to Marcela about putting a first book together, dark humour and writing through grief.

Tess Liem: Would you talk about how you started writing Tropico?

Marcela Huerta: It was actually while I was in a book club that I had with Jay Ritchie and Alex Manley and my best friend Kate Ramsden when I started writing a few pieces. Earlier that year (this was last year that I started writing the book) in the summer I had gone to an event and this author, who had a similar background as my parents, said that she felt like she could only engage with writing that was coming post-dealing-with-your-emotions and your trauma, instead of being in the midst of it. And I disagree so heartily.

I’ve always been so interested in trauma and writing about trauma so I remember hearing that, feeling disillusioned and thinking, when will I ever write about this if I agree with her, I don’t know when that time will come. And in disagreeing with her, I started to write more. At the book club I mentioned wanting to be in a writing workshop that Jay had talked about and he very kindly emailed me about it. So I sent him some stuff. I had seven pieces that I had been working on and originally, I had wanted to do a book of essays but I think a lot of the writing I was doing at that time was coming from a place of grief and working through grief so that became more my focus.

TL: In Tropico there are prose poems and lineated poems and one way to read them is the prose as narrative or mini-short stories, while the verse is working through those stories, reflecting on events. The way the forms relate is more complicated than that, but in the verse, there’s more “I” speaking and lots of body. This dynamic between forms is a unique part of Tropico. I’m interested in how you see them working together.

MH: The prose pieces were the first pieces I wrote and those were kind of written at a time that I was very much trying to deal with grief, grief that was very delayed. When my dad passed away I was like, I’m doing fine. I just kept working and said, This is all OK. Then a year later I had a brutal winter of loneliness and missing him, so that kind of coincided with this writing. Then Jay just kept asking to see more and gently pushing me and it was definitely something that I needed. I finished 33 pages or something like that and then worked to making it longer over the next few months and slowly started experimenting more. I started working on more of the lineated poetry and the writing through feelings, writing through memories, and focusing less on the experience of collecting a history. Because for me it was so much about telling—or I guess asking—how do you tell these stories that are so dependent on oral histories when the people that are telling those stories are suffering, either suffering from PTSD or they just can’t engage with it anymore? You kind of collect those little bits and pieces over the course of your life and you just have to put together a story that’s mostly yours and may or may not be what actually happened. It’s more your reflection of how you see the people that matter to you.

TL: There is also the direct address, writing to “you,” which has all sorts of effects for thinking about memory and history. It also creates a distinct voice so I’m wondering how you think about this choice to write in second person?

MH: It comes from two places. The first book that I read as a teenager that really jump-started this kind of anger and made me want to write was Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao;  and in my high school, everything that we were studying–there was actually not a single writer of colour. So I remember reading that book and feeling so mad. Also, it was like it was speaking to me and I could really relate to the way Diaz uses the second person. Junot was the main person who, when I started writing, I was inspired by as a teenager.

In terms of this particular work, it felt so important to me because he [my father] is both there and not there. In that sense, the second person is like a letter and is also like a conversation and that felt like something that really needed to be in the book. Then the second person just kind of built itself into Tropico in a way that it became every piece in the book, except for the one that’s from my mom’s point of view about the earthquake (“Terremoto”). To me it felt like it was a necessary part of telling the story because so much of it is me trying to engage with my own grief and engage with a grief that is so ongoing with someone who is gone but for whom I still have a lot of questions.

Sometimes it also feels like it’s a confrontation. That’s also a big part of the book for me. Confronting all these concepts and ideas that I have about memory and my culture and my history, about my parents’ history. I feel like the second person does so much for that. It expresses so much gentleness, but also it can express so much anger and frustration.

TL: The use of the second person also seems particularly related to being second generation and how we hear, retell, and remember our parents’ stories.

MH: And a lot of the story and the history of my parents has been told to me not by them because often they’re incapable of doing that. So you get this––I would have my sister tell me a story, and to me, [writing Tropico] was kind of like trying to confirm with them, this is a thing that happened to you, is it not?

TL: And processing family stories, having them re-told to you, asking for confirmation, all of these aspects of recounting your family history, as you get older, they can change how you remember those stories.

MH: Memory is such a troubling and difficult thing to engage with. I wanted to play with how you can take these family stories and they can be completely shattered in a second by someone telling you, oh that happened to your cousin, it didn’t happen to your sister, and all of a sudden, all those images are gone. They’re suddenly no longer a part of an image of yourself and of the family life that you’ve created.

I tried to engage with that a lot with the pieces that were from secondhand knowledge, so for example, “The Man Without A Face,” the one on the plane, I remember my dad telling me about his plane ride from Chile and he completely left out the fact that his daughter was on the plane with him. I remember having this conversation with my [half] sister about it and she explained all of that to me, about her experience, which was that her mom had died and she had been with our grandmother because our dad had been in hiding and then all of a sudden they told her she was going to Canada and they were all going and that she was going to go first with my dad but nobody really explained that to her. She hadn’t seen him in several months and then she was just right next to him. To me this was such a revelation. When I heard this story, in such a completely different way, is when I realized he could only engage with one part of his experience, he could suddenly not be a father. He was a man who was leaving his entire life behind. He didn’t even remember her being there.

TL: This relates to a striking image at the end of “There is still time to ask questions,” a piece I kept returning to. You write, “I can’t really imagine much from these photos they’re so badly taken.” For me, this became an emblematic image for the book. Memories become a kind of act of imagination because what you have is so damaged and hard to see.

MH: Exactly, it’s so blurry and there were so many things like that where I had had a version of the story and I had related to it so much and that had been my story. You know when you’re a kid and you’re like, my mom did this and my dad did this, and then to all of a sudden have those things shifted and to see the humanity in my parents more, see their flaws.

Marcela Huerta, author of Tropico

TL: I wanted to ask about laughing and humour too. In “El Chacotero,” which starts, “Here is one of your funny stories,” and also in the poem before it, “Sad,” in which you talk about your mother, and laughing so that people know that it’s a joke. Would you talk about humour in Tropico?

MH: Engaging with my parents and the cultural jokiness that is very emblematic of Chileans, at least the ones in my life, is really interesting to me because I spent most of my childhood and most of my young adulthood wanting to be a comedy screenwriter. I remember I used to feel like I was so funny and it just–since my dad passed away–I remember I had this moment in my life where I was on the bus (he had had cancer and was in remission) and I was on the bus back from Toronto and I found out that he was going into palliative care and that was the moment where I felt like, well I am no longer funny.

I still watch so many comedies, I still read comedy and yet, it made me reflect on my own parents in this way that I never had to before, where for the first time I really felt what they were masking, and nothing was funny anymore. Everything that used to be, like everything that I would get some semblance of dark humour out of, it was suddenly so brutal and painful. I feel like I’ve always also–I have this from my mom, where I really try to make people comfortable through humour, and you know you spend so much time trying to make male bosses comfortable, teachers comfortable, and I didn’t want to feel like that anymore. It took a lot of my lightness away. But I feel like that lightness has been replaced with a more honest lightness, more of an engagement with how I’m really feeling and there can still be humour in that.

TL: Well it’s really well done, especially in “El Chacotero” because it opens with “Here is one of your funny stories,” and it ends with weeping, or rather weeping and laughter, and that’s ok.

ML: And it is really interesting to see, as an adult, these stories, and all of the pain that those stories are masking, and to break through it and see what’s underneath, especially with “El Chacotero.” As an adult I find it so difficult to reflect on my dad’s childhood because it was abusive and the only stories that he could tell about his childhood were these ridiculous stories that were so strange and so funny because he couldn’t go beyond that. Because if he did, it revealed too much pain. Every once in a while, you see a crack in that and you see, in the history that your parents have, or that people that you love have, you kind of see that slip, and you realize there’s so much more underneath there that you’re not able to bring to the surface.

This interview was originally published in the digital edition of Vallum Issue 15:1 “Memory and Loss.” 

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