I started reading poems when I was thirteen, and I was really autodidactic. I learned how to write poems by reading poems. And when you read a lot of poems—constantly, every day—you learn how to pick up intuitively the kinds of things they teach you to notice in school.  I instinctively learned a lot of different elements of “craft” when I started writing, and then later on learned all the terms for them.

There are so many different ways to talk about how a poem works, and so many different metaphors. But, in certain contexts, thinking about a poem as a machine can be really useful. Looking at a poem, and asking: how do the different pieces of this poem operate together? I love thinking about the intricate ways a really good poem produces emotion. The way that I like to think about craft is on a reactive level: how did this poet manage to do this, to produce this feeling? There is certainly value in analyzing a poem from a cold, academic perspective. But I think that value evaporates when that’s the only lens a reader uses to approach the work with which they’re engaging.

The poet who made me want to start writing poems was Vladimir Mayakovsky. There was a poet-in-residence at my middle school, and she had this tiny little desk in a tiny little library where I spent most of my time. One day, I found a poem in a book of Mayakovsky’s open on her desk, “A Cloud in Trousers,” and the thing that struck me the most was this unbridled emotion. In the poem, Mayakovsky is stood up by this woman who he’s in love with and who’s married to someone else, and his reaction is to explode onto the street. But as a child, I was awed by the vivid lack of restraint, this chaotic, wild, beautiful, and complex outpour of feeling, which was something that I didn’t have a lot of access to. And I discovered that language could open that door for me. 

Mayakovsky and the other poets of his generation, his ilk, the Russian Modernists, had this really beautiful synthesis of emotional sincerity and intensity with political necessity and urgency. Mayakovsky himself was a propagandist, an agitator. Stalin called him his favorite poet (and then likely killed him—or instigated the conditions that led to his suicide). But for me, the ways in which poems allow a reader to access feeling, I think those are also the ways in which poems are really useful political tools. Because a poem does not allow politics to be disentangled from the material reality of feeling.

Well, first and foremost, in America, we can thank the CIA (the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the MFA program, “show don’t tell,” etc) for this very intentional disconnect of politicality from cultural production. There’s also the French “poésie pure,” the idea that a poem or a work of art needs to be concerned only with questions of “beauty.” It is in the best interest of the people who created these kinds of classroom environments, the people who invented “craft,” to distance poetics from politics because of their own particular political positionality. White men are much better served by poetry that is only focused on these lofty abstract questions of beauty and truth. But I also feel strongly and see widely that those monoliths—both the writers that are taught and the way that they are taught—are beginning to fall away.

And what they can’t do, as well. The idea that the classroom was ever a de-politicized space in any way, shape, or form—I don’t give a fuck what class is being taught inside of it—is just simply untrue. As we know, everything is political, right? But a classroom space is especially political. Education is political: who gets to learn? Who gets to teach? What is taught? These are all wildly political questions.

The teachers and professors I encountered who most influenced and shaped my own poetics were poets who were themselves deeply interested in questions like: what does a poem mean in the world? John Murillo and Martín Espada were early teachers who had a real impact on me. Espada is, of course, a great Puerto Rican political poet whose poems are emphatically concerned with the lives of people and the systems that organize, disorganize, and oppress them. I tried to seek out teachers whose conceptions of poetics felt engaged with the living world. And then the ones who didn’t did not have very much to offer me.

HF

I think we would all benefit from having that kind of clarity on what we’re seeking. From my experience, those teachers can also really harm your thinking and hold it back.

CB

Yeah! One of the primary purposes of a teacher is to teach you what to read. Not even necessarily how to read it. But Martín, for example, introduced me to this wide universe of Latin American poetry, a poetics that is so deeply, fundamentally, and materially engaged with struggle, with politics, and with political organization. Poets like César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Eduardo Galeano, Delmira Agustini, Ernesto Cardenal, Alejandra Pizarnik, José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Julia de Burgos, and Raúl Zurita, of course; all of these poets for whom writing happened in concert with revolution. Che Guevara wrote poems! They’re middling, but he read poems voraciously. I was exposed to this different kind of poetics that wasn’t circumscribed by American sterility, by this emphasis on removing the conditions of life from the pool of acceptable subjects.

HF

You mentioned this term “engaged.” What does that look like to you?

CB

CB

Yeah! The agency that Zurita gives the natural world, it happens throughout every book of Zurita’s. And not just every book, but every poetic act. Because Zurita’s work has not limited itself to the physical page but has exploded onto the world in these really large-scale, incredible ways. In INRI, there’s this really intimate, one-to-one connection to the landscape to the grief, and struggle, and possibility of Chile. This insistence that the land is an actor in the political life and struggle of his country. This idea is written into every line of the book. 

In an interview, Zurita writes:

“The struggle in Chile was not for the words, but rather for their meaning. What does the word homeland mean? What does the word Chile mean? It means what the military wanted it to mean. What the fascists wanted it to mean. The landscapes of my country are mine. And they are mine, because they are built through poetry. Poetry created those meanings. From that point is from where the landscapes emerge. They are creations of art, fundamentally built from words. So the landscapes moved me first as such, and also well, these landscapes were the only compassion, the only thing that received so many bodies dropped from planes, crushed bodies thrown to the sea. That sea is also the sea of our dead.” 

In Chile, the violence of the Pinochet regime was spread across those landscapes, across the mountains, the deserts, the sea, and a huge part of Zurita’s project is to refuse this natural world as a graveyard for the regime. And so, in so many of his projects, he endeavors to return language to the land. The phrase, “ni pena, ni miedo,” (neither shame nor fear) is bulldozed into the Atacama desert. It’s two kilometers long. He did a skywriting project over New York City in the 70s, of his poem, “La vida nueva:” “My God is hunger. My God is snow. My God is disillusionment.” He commissioned a plane to sky-write his poem over the New York City skyline. He had poems projected onto the mountains in Chile. His projects have really fundamentally made this connection between the poetics of resistance and returning an agency to the land that allows the land to resist with the people. 

And I think there are so many connections one can make there to the relationship with the people of Palestine with the land of Palestine. The land has always been enormously central to the Palestinian struggle. And the poets of Palestine have unfailingly connected their struggle with that relationship.

And the land abhors that. We can think of guerrilla revolutionaries in Latin America, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the jungles of Cuba, and the ways in which resistance co-conspires with the land. Always, the people who know their home are so much more able to defend it. The success of the Vietcong in the war was due to their intimate knowledge of the land and the place in which they lived. An invader, or an outsider, or a colonizer cannot win against the land. The only way to “win” is to destroy the land. 70 percent of Gaza has been fucking bulldozed. 

Forced disappearances, which are also a staple of many fascist regimes, are certainly happening in Palestine constantly, and have been for generations. But now in particular, with imprisonment and disappearances. They are such a central node of grief in INRI and throughout Zurita’s work because it’s worse than killing a person. A forced disappearance creates this imposition of a violent hope for the people who are left behind, where they are unable to grieve. The particular horrors in Chile, the dropping of bodies from airplanes and into the sea, the destruction of bodies in the desert with explosives, people whose names were not written down, who were not kept track of, who are gone, but are not allowed to fully be gone because the question is allowed to remain as to their survival—it’s horrifying. And what I love about this book is that it allows the land that received these people to speak, and to grieve, and to move, and to house the dead in a different kind of way. It’s a long elegy. And elegies are important. They are political. They allow us to move with and around and through our grief. They are a kind of gift.