poetic conversations: Tradition of Beginnings & Many Coordinates of Meaning, a conversation between LynleyShimat Lys and Cristina Pérez Díaz

In Indigenous Studies we often talk about intellectual genealogies and artistic genealogies — these can be our relatives, our communities, or the intellectuals and artists who influence us. In your collection, From the founding of the country, you mention Manuel Ramos Otero and Walt Whitman, as well as Henry David Thoreau and Livy. Could you tell us more about who you see as your lineage as an artist and writer?

Rather than thinking about origins and lineages — which to me are obscure and untraceable… where to start? — I prefer to think about specific moments of reading that have produced specific moments of writing. I don’t see myself in a genealogical relation to any of the writers I mention in the book, though I do feel I owe them something. This book is to a great extent the product of an intense moment of reading Manuel Ramos Otero’s Invitación al polvo beside Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I was reading a bunch of other stuff too. I was in grad school, so the intense reading of these two distinct books is framed by the reading of ancient Greek and Latin poetry and prose, of Cavafy in different English translations, of T.S. Eliot, as well as a whole lot of academic papers and monographs; in fact, the book meditates on how the moment of “lying in bed” (as in “reading in bed”) is framed by a sea of writings.

Or, coming at the question from a different angle, and to contradict myself, which I love, there is a certain genealogy, if we want to think about the exercise of translation as a genealogical moment. It’s not genealogical in the long duration of time, one thing coming out of another in a sequence of influence, but at the synchronic moment of the birth of the translated text. For a metaphor, we can think of it as Aphrodite born out of the phallus of Uranus, fallen to the sea, a moment of translation from foam to goddess… In that case, then, yes, we can think about genealogy in this book. Genealogy in the sense of the synchronic birth of the poems from the failed attempt at translating Ramos Otero’s Invitación al polvo into English, with the company of Walt Whitman.

How might your work be situated in relationship to Nuyorican and Puerto Rican social movements; for instance, the Young Lords, the Taíno Movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the environmental movement in Puerto Rico? Are there other influences you see as central or highly related to this collection?

My experience in New York as someone who moved to the city voluntarily to go to grad school is marked by a different class experience than that of most diasporic Puerto Rican writers of the Nuyorican movement, who perhaps were born in the city, or moved to the city as kids with their families, and whose experience was very much marked by the grim conditions to which working-class Puerto Ricans were subjected in the States. So I wouldn’t try to equal our experiences of the city and of migration, the places from where we were writing. I think because of that, whatever it is we are searching for in our poetry has to be different.

It’s hard for me to put my work in relation to social movements, because I don’t see my poetic work as activism or as “political” (only in the restrictive sense in which anything we do is political, but at that point the adjective kind of loses its meaning). As a matter of fact, I tend to dislike “artivism,” because in my eyes it often fails at being the two things it purports to be: art and political activism, or it’s a bad version of both. At the political level, it bothers me, because I think there’s this trap for the oppressed — a trap I’m always keenly aware of — that they’re always expected to talk about their oppression, as if that were the only diction allowed to them, the only limited vocabulary other people can understand coming out of their mouths. The same diction, always addressed to the oppressor, as if the oppressor were the only possible addressee of our letters. And it always only says one thing: I’m oppressed, you oppress me. By the way, that letter remains never read by the addressee but always returned to the sender. So for me, it’s the politics of most “political” poetry that’s problematic.

Now, to contradict myself again: in a sense, I could say there’s an activism to my book. An activism of going against that politics. An activism of pleasure against the mandate to talk always and only about oppression, of opening space for the dictions of pleasure, and for anything and everything that is beautiful and that we have to make the point of claiming for ourselves. A similar tension is sort of the backbone of the book: the tension between the labors of historical action and the desire to stay inactive, entirely given to physical enjoyment and the intensity of love. The quest of the lovers is simultaneously a quest for the country and for the lyric.

After that sort of praeteritio, I come back to your question about Puerto Rican radical social movements and how I situate my work in relation to them. I believe in the utopia of Puerto Rico’s independence. I say utopia because the independence I desire would be detached from the experience of colonialism, it wouldn’t be a post-colonial independence but the birth of a place freed not only of the colonizer but also and especially of its own, very local, rapacious “elites,” who’d take any and every opportunity to continue gorging on the spoils.

My country exists in this paradoxical situation of being without ever having started. In that sense, we are always forever initiating our country. And all of our writing is initial and foundational in that sense. We haven’t been able to write past the foundational moment, because our country has never been founded. Not that there’s no “tradition.” Again, it’s paradoxical: a tradition of beginnings? Our poetic aesthetic, I’d say, tends to the fragmentary, with very few attempts at monumentality — I can think of Matos Paoli’s Canto de la locura, and even that can be read as a monument of fragments. There’s no “Song of Myself” monumentality. Ramos Otero is a singer of the body in fragments. And in that sense, it is the opposite of Whitman’s very expansive and athletic movements through what can only be a vast landscape. But even the monument tends toward the fragment as its inevitable future. That’s perhaps why I found it productive reading Ramos Otero beside Whitman.

I notice in your collection some recurring words and phrases from Manuel Ramos Otero and from your English translations of his work. Do you think of this collection as creative translation, as a conversation with Ramos Otero, as Ramos Otero meets Whitman, or something else?

I’d say it is a translation gone mad. New poems (like limbs) proliferated out of the initial exercise of translation, of collage and outright plagiarism. The two main tongues are those of Ramos Otero and Whitman. (I have to add, though, that the recurring question, very important for the book, “we need a new verb, what would it be, elegy?,” is from Virginia Woolf, and I haven’t been able to find the work where I got it from!)

Do you ever find yourself having conversations with Manuel Ramos Otero? Is there anything you would want to ask him?

Not really. I’m very much still a product of poststructuralism, and I think of myself as relating to texts, not authors. I heard he had an impressive physical presence, an aura and voice, and beautiful hands. There’s a short essay I published as a footnote to a translation, where I think about his epitaphs and Cavafy’s via Callimachus AP VII, 80 (an epitaph to a certain Heraclitus). If I imagine now a conversation with him, in response to your question, maybe I’d share with him my translations of Greek epitaphs and we’d talk about that.

I really love the idea of an erotics of islands and the way this shifts colonial relations between the U.S. and Puerto Rico. There seems to be both a political shift and also a shift from the larger political context to the individual relationship between two people. Could you tell us more about how the collection developed and how you decided to link the sections together?

The thematic tension between political action and lazy pleasure is paralleled by a formal tension between the epic, the lyric, and historical prose. The different sections reflect the tendency of lyric to turn into prose and the seduction that the lyric exercises upon the prosaic. You can see the lyric striving for the horizontality of prose lines and the prose falling into the verticality of the lyric moment. It’s existentially hard to stay in the lyric. The long form stages that utopianism of staying in the lyric for more than it’s usually allowed us.

The geopolitical situation of my country is the historical context of anything and everything I write. But context is only one of the many coordinates of meaning. I’m unavoidably speaking from my context, but I’m not necessarily talking about it. I’m talking about something else. Or perhaps about the colonial situation, yes, but not in a restricted way, and not in an autobiographical way. I think the colonial appears mostly as a threat to the lovers, as the violence that looms over anything we humans strive to found, including love.

This collection is a revised edition of a collection you published previously — the section in Spanish at the end is unique to this version. Could you tell us more about the decision to add this section? And more about the way you see multilingual poetry — for instance, what is the relationship between writing in English versus Spanish? Or translating from Latin and Ancient Greek into other languages?

The first edition also had Spanish poems at the end, but in this one I added a few that were part of the original manuscript that I removed from the galleys right before the book went to the printer due to some anxiety that overtakes me when I’m about to publish — I tend to over-edit and make things worse.

I wrote the book in English because I was living in English. I was living in New York, I was in grad school, I was taking and teaching classes in English, I was reading mostly English and Greek and Latin. And I was intensely reading Whitman, I think because in my second semester at Columbia, as I was trying to translate Ramos Oteros’ Invitación al polvo, I was taking a class on the poetics of Cavafy and at some point we talked about Whitman. Maybe that’s what happened. So the words, the images, the feelings, they all took shape in English. I finished the book in Puerto Rico, and I was then living back in Spanish, so the final poems happened in that language. These last poems in Spanish are very different from the rest of the collection in more than the language. I actually don’t like much how I write poetry in Spanish. I don’t seem to be able to get out of the hendecasyllable and the octosyllable, they’re so sticky in Spanish — but they’re part of the book and bring it to a sort of conclusion. I realized that by adding them, the book has two endings, in a way, because for those readers who can’t read the Spanish, the book ends in the second to last section, there’s no arrival. I liked that. There’s different endings for different languages, as a result of my own (physical) movement from one language to another. Coming back to the issue of political art: you could say there’s a politics to that too, because for the English reader, who tends to be in such a privileged position elsewhere, there’s always a remainder, something they can’t get a hold on. Now, I wouldn’t say that the reader of Spanish has a grasp of the whole either.

I didn’t mean to write multilingually, it just happened, because those were the moments of reading, and living, that produced the writing. There’s the experiential moment of “translation” in the sense of movement from one place to another — provoked by the pandemic — which forced me to return from New York City to San Juan, and it created a different moment of intense reading surrounded by Spanish.

I also really love the two women and the queer relationship at the center of the collection. I enjoy the shift away from queer male contexts of Ramos Otero and Whitman into a discourse between women or non-male queer people. How did you develop this idea? How do you see the relationship between the women creating or manifesting a female / nonbinary / queer gaze?

I refrain from using the word “queer” to describe the book or the relationship between the female voices. I don’t experience life as what we call a “queer” person, so it’d feel disingenuous at the very least to qualify my poetry as such. I think people who do experience life as such would be offended if I did so, because there are real and often dire consequences for living life as a queer person. But again, I’m not trying to write autofiction or give a testimony of my own experience, nor to represent the experience of others. The contrivance of the book is a romantic/erotic relationship born out of the literary juxtaposition of Ramos Otero and Walt Whitman. As these voices became “my own voice,” I felt compelled to turn them into female voices. It’s a literary device I might have learned reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, though I wouldn’t know how to name it (we need a new verb, maybe “orlando”).

But I think I’m in debt to what scholars of Latin love elegy have called the scripta puella, which can be translated as “written female lover” — a common conceit whereby the female addressee of the love poem was a placeholder for the poem or poetry itself. I’m aware from a gender perspective this is quite problematic. What interests me about the ancients is certainly not their morals and values, which I don’t think we should reproduce or hold as any kind of paradigm. What interests me about them is their undeniable mastery of the poetic. The Latin love elegists were extremely learned and experimental. They were self-conscious of working within a tradition; self-conscious of the act of writing, always playing with the boundaries of genre as defined by topic, meter, and length, and yet their poems don’t lack humor and a mastery of the power of colloquial language. They’re always playing, many games at the same time. To me they are the teachers of what a book of poems could be, thought of as a unity even if the poems stand by themselves. This little thing where language is operating at so many levels. I stand by that.

As to the politics of gender, I hope I’m not reproducing that violent male gaze. I don’t think I am. There’s agency to using more than one voice. And I also felt it was necessary to have a foundational poem with only women, I guess that’s also part of my utopianism. At any rate, our foundational stories have been very male homoerotic, and that doesn’t seem to have prevented straight people from identifying with them.

How do you see the relationship between Nuyorican populations in New York and Puerto Rican populations living on Borikén? Ramos Otero seems to have bridged the two communities in various ways. How do you see the relationship between the women in the collection in the context of these two interrelated communities?

New York appears in the book in one poem (I mention Macy’s and the train uptown, but never “New York”), where I intrude as a voice in the narrative and camouflage as one of the female voices. New York is very much the city of Whitman and of Invitación al polvo, and where I happened to be living as I was writing. The Spanish poems in the last section arrive at a tropical landscape in ruins that could be read as Puerto Rico. But the book doesn’t take place in any real geography; it creates its own place in its foundational quest. And the female voices don’t represent, in my understanding of the work, Puerto Rico and New York.

That said, New York has been essential for Puerto Rico — and Puerto Rico for New York — in a million ways. Regarding specifically the fight for independence, New York has been a privileged locus for the conceptualization of an independent republic. Puerto Ricans have repeatedly looked at themselves through the looking glass of New York City. To give you only two, quite powerfully symbolic examples: The Puerto Rican flag was designed in New York (by the Puerto Rican section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party), and Pedro Pietri and Adál Maldonado forged the Puerto Rican Passport in New York and performatively declared the foundation of El Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico.

There is, of course, the nostalgic imagination of the diaspora, looking back at the left-behind landscapes of the lost tropical paradise. That’s the diasporic literature that’s privileged in school curricula. Yet there are many Puerto Ricos originating in New York and traveling back and forth to the archipelago that are not nostalgic but forward-looking reconceptualizations, reimaginings, new foundings of Puerto Rican identity, diction, lingo, and spirit. In New York, Puerto Rico stops being a place whose main mode of contact with others is through the unequal relation of tourism, militarism, and colonization, and gets creatively entangled with equal brothers and sisters from the rest of the Caribbean, with Black Americans, with Jews, and the rest of the world that populates the barrios and streets of that wonderfully non-American city.

Perhaps my book, in a way, performs, yet again, that gesture of founding our country from the experience of this going back and forth between the two islands.

On the subject of bridging, I’m interested in the connections between poetry and philosophy. This collection feels very much like an embodied philosophy and a decolonial challenge to the boundaries between poetry and philosophy, as well as a challenge to the idea that philosophy can be divided from the body or from geography. How do you view the relationship between poetry and philosophy?

That’s a philosophical question in itself, dating back to Plato (or you could say to Heraclitus and Parmenides) in the traditions I’m familiar with. 20th century European philosophy made an enormous effort to bridge the divide. In the Spanish tradition, you have María Zambrano, trying to prove Plato wrong and bringing the poets back to the philosophical republic. There’s of course Heidegger with his endless meditations on the relationship between being and poetic diction. Our major Caribbean thinker, Édouard Glissant, combined the two modes of discourse and thought the Caribbean was in need of the epic expression and of the tragic in order to think itself.

I love them and enjoy reading them much, but don’t necessarily agree.

To me poetry and philosophy are very distinct modes of discourse. I majored in philosophy as an undergrad and have a Master’s in philosophy as well. While I studied philosophy, I stopped writing poetry. It wasn’t intentional. It was almost physical — I was so immersed in philosophical prose that it was impossible for me to write verse. When I felt the irresistible pull to write poetry again, I changed my area of studies and became a classicist. Maybe that’s a personal limitation, that I can’t hold two modes of discourse in my body at the same time. I think you can call a certain philosopher “poetic” and certain poems “philosophical,” being flexible with your adjectives, and the two languages can pretend to overlap, but there are benefits to try keeping them apart. I say this because philosophy’s essential diction is argument, that’s what it contributes to the vast dinner table of creative thinking, and I think it’s very important to preserve, now perhaps more than ever, our capacity to make and understand logical arguments. What I love about poetry is that it breaks free from the demands of rigorous argumentation — I love the non sequiturs, the privilege of image over argument, and, again, the focus on the pleasure of language for pleasure’s and language’s own sake.

I guess you could say that my book plays with the possibility of blurring the two forms of discourse, but I wouldn’t call it philosophy. As I said, it stages the difficulty of staying in the lyric for an extended period. So, if my book is philosophical, I think that is a marvelous example of how the text always exceeds its author, and perhaps what I do in the book is not all consonant with what I believe.

In a Hawaiian and Pasifika context, people often refer to the Pacific Islands region as a sea of islands, after writer and scholar Epeli Hau’ofa. I’m wondering if and in what ways your collection suggests something similar about the ways that the Atlantic Ocean connects Puerto Rico to the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York. How does the ocean figure as an entity or character in your work?

I’ve read some scholarship on islands and archipelagic thinking, but that was after I finished and first published this book. Because of the initial conceit of the book, there is a tension between island and mainland, between the vast landscapes of the mainland and the more restricted spaces of the island.

It’s funny, now that I think about it, the ocean figures only as a trace. The voices talk about expeditions by boat, and in the Spanish section, there’s an arrival at a place with a shore. In one of the poems, the voice promises the lover “endless expeditions” by sail, which suggests the sea as the canvas of the future (to wreck or to arrive?), also as a promise that’s prefigured in bed (to wreck or to arrive?). But the voices are never at sea. Maybe I’m afraid of the sea.

I spend all day with middle school students from the Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Caribbean diaspora communities. Is there anything you would want to tell them about this collection or about its themes?

I would like to earnestly and eagerly invite them to read Manuel Ramos Otero, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Cavafy, Pedro Pietri, Jacques Derrida, Plato, Sappho, Catullus, Callimachus, Propertius, Ovid, and Homer. Or to read whatever they want, but to do it intensely, without iPhones or screens nearby, to give themselves the strange pleasure of “just” reading a book. It’s very intense, like nothing else, the exact opposite of “scrolling” — despite the fact that that verb comes from the book culture, when books were scrolls. (That reminds me of something my teacher Ammiel Alcalay once said: “Tweeting is an insult to birds.”) Maybe we need a new verb for the finite experience of reading in times of infinite scrolling. What should it be?

poetic conversations: Tradition of Beginnings & Many Coordinates of Meaning, a conversation… was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.