Split This Rock Interviews Sheila Black, 10th Annual Poetry Contest Judge

Split This Rock's Program and Administrative Associate Tiana Trutna recently interviewed Sheila Black, judge for the 2017 Split This Rock Annual Poetry Contest. In the exchange, the two cover topics such as disability, intersectionality, what Sheila looks for in a poem, and joy. We invite you to get to know Sheila Black and be sure to send in your poems for the Annual Poetry Contest by November 1.

ABOUT SHEILA BLACK

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq (both CW Press), Wen Kroy (Dream Horse Press), and Iron, Ardent, forthcoming from Educe Press in 2017. She is a co-editor with Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a 2012 Notable Book for Adults by the American Library Association.  A 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow, selected by Philip Levine, she lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.

THE INTERVIEW

You co-edited the phenomenal Beauty is a Verb, The New Poetry of Disability with Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen. What surprised you the most about this anthology’s impact?

I think what surprised me most was the fact that BIAV (Beauty is a Verb, The New Poetry of Disability) even came into existence and then that it was noticed. I should explain—at the time Jen and I and Mike began this, we had nothing more than a glimmer of an idea behind us.  None of us had jobs in academia or many publishing contacts at that point. I had just left the university where I’d been an adjunct and then a contract instructor for many years, and had no job, and no clear sense of job direction. Jen was trying to eke out a living as a poet and adjunct instructor, and Mike had just retired from his work as educational coordinator for Inglis House, a facility that serves people with disabilities in Philadelphia. In a way, our lack of sustained employment was good, because we devoted ourselves entirely and wholeheartedly to putting together Beauty is a Verb. But to be honest I think we had very modest expectations of what would become of it.  We imagined years of sending the book to small presses—some sort of small quiet publication—and just the satisfaction we’d done good work.

What actually happened was a little more miraculous. On New Year’s Eve, when we’d been working on the project for about nine months, I went to a New Year’s Eve Party and happened to be seated next to Bobby Byrd, poet and publisher of Cinco Puntos Press.  He asked me what I’d been up to. I told him—and I must have sounded excited, because he asked to see the manuscript. I sent it to him New Year’s Day. Two days later he called me and said Cinco Puntos wanted to publish it. I suppose I am telling this story for all the writers and thinkers out there with a project like ours in their minds—a project born out of sheer faith, love. An amateur project, if you will. I think BIAV taught me anyway that if you really go with what you believe, and you do your very best to make the work strong, bigger things can happen than you expect. 

What makes you proud about the book’s accomplishments?

I am proud that Beauty is a Verb  helped move non-disability communities away from a purely tragic conception  of disability, or disability as simply a condition of being “less than.” I’m glad we were able to trace through the wonderful writers who contributed some of ways in which disability is a socially constructed phenomenon and how that construction occurs.  And—I have to add—it still shocks me how dominant the idea of being “less than”: is—not only for people with disabilities, but for communities of color, communities of immigrants, LGTBQIA communities. We know it is wrong, but even so that idea persists and gets reproduced. I’m proud that BIAV is one of the many books of poetry, cultural artifacts we are seeing now that are exposing that idea for the fraudulent construct it is.

You’ve said in past interviews that while editing the anthology, Beauty is a Verb, The New Poetry of Disability your ideas about disability expanded. Could you share a bit about that?

By expanded my ideas of disability I think I meant I did not fully appreciate the creative aspects of most disability experiences—by that I mean the multiple ways in which alternative embodiment or what is often called “disordered thinking” often lead to experiences and insights that simply wouldn’t be available otherwise. To give some specifics—the way Larry Eigner describes space from the perspective  of one who does not move freely within it; what ASL brings to the language of a poet like John Lee Clark—a kind of filmic quality or way of charting action; or how C.S. Giscombe conceives of transportation systems or “settling land” in a completely unique way that arises both out of his experience as an African-American man and a person with a disability; what Norma Coles’ work post-stroke tell us about the relationship between the word and what lies before the word. I became more appreciative of everyone’s—and I really do mean everyone’s—possession of a unique set of experiential information that can add to the body of all our knowledge; I think empathy, when it is really empathy, is less sympathy or pity than a bare recognition of that fact—realizing that expanded my sense of value and made me question the hierarchies, I had always lived within, which in most cases were historically established. What was it Elizabeth Bishop said in “To the Fishouses?”—“our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.” When I was editing Beauty is a Verb I thought a lot about history—both as resource and burden. 

You’re helping to launch a new literary organization for poets with disabilities called Zoeglassia. Can you tell us more about the organization and its aspirations?

Zoeglossia is an idea still, but soon to be implemented. I am very excited about it. The founders, Jennifer Bartlett, Connie Voisine and I were very indebted to forbearers like Canto Mundo, Kundiman, Cave Canem, and Lambda Literary—organizations that pioneered the idea of creating open spaces and supportive communities for African American, Asian-American, Latino, and LGTB poets. We were talking about these organizations, and how important they had been, and started to think that writers with disabilities really needed a similar space. In fact, this need seemed particularly urgent to us because people with disabilities are often isolated—in pure economic terms they also often don’t have significant resources to travel, to engage in mainstream writers conferences, educational opportunities, etc. 

The goal of Zoeglossia is to create an annual retreat that would involve professional development of attendees by prominent, established writers with disabilities. This would include writing workshops, lectures, panel discussions and literary readings. The emerging writers will be selected competitively based on their writing and their expenses at the retreat will be covered in order to facilitate participation. Writers will attend the retreat three times over a five-year period to attain the credential of “fellow.” While people with disabilities are among the largest minority group in America, writers with disabilities are vastly underrepresented in academia in general, and specifically in publishing, creative writing programs and the organizations that govern the field. We look to Zoeglossia to be an advocate for more representation of people with disabilities, but also a space for nurturing writers with disabilities to produce their own best works—a shared creative community with all that this implies.

With Vilissa Thompson starting the #DisabilityTooWhite conversation on Twitter, there’s been some critique lately about disability being portrayed as overwhelmingly white in the media and disability community. How do you negotiate your whiteness as a disabled person and what are your thoughts on intersectionality?

Vilissa Thompson is telling an important truth. I am not on Twitter—I am such a technology Luddite—so I missed this when it first happened, but she is so right. The media does portray disability as overwhelmingly white. It is also true that within disability communities we have a long way to go in terms of being fully multi-cultural in our organizations and movements. The sad irony is that this is exactly not the experience of disability itself. One of the powers of disability—if I can use such a word—is the way it cuts across differences of race, class, and nation.

I was stopped a little by the second part of this question…I tried to figure out why I was having a hard time answering, and I realized it was the word “negotiate,” which I perhaps wrongly tend to associate with business dealings or work conflicts. I don’t know that my whiteness is negotiable. What I mean by that is that it is the weight of history…To be white in this country is to have a history of enforced privilege—to have been part of a story that is terrible and raw and involves genocide, and slavery, and colonization, and a pattern of oppression that has not yet ended.  I may long to disavow that personally, but I really can’t, and I think—if I could be so bold—that to “negotiate” it feels wrong to me.  I am not sure what to do about it, but it feels more like something I just have to sit with, live with, mourn and try to address—but not in a way that is controlling, because control, or the control implied for me by a word like negotiation, feels all wrong for the scale of the thing. That historical weight feels rather like something I should hold in the darkest silence of myself, try to breathe through, and try to really contemplate hard. I guess I am trying to say my personal negotiation feels a lot less important to me than being vulnerable to it. 

Intersectionality seems to me the way we have to move to move forward, particularly as the tools, especially the psychological modes of oppression, often function in remarkably similar ways—no matter what group they are used against…I hope that the movement toward greater justice for people with disabilities, people of color, LGTB people leads to a different sense of social order, a different way to understand and value our communities. A movement, in other words, that creates an order that is not quite so much like our current one, which is a little more like a pyramid scheme than I would like—a few lucky souls at the top and everyone else struggling to rise. I don’t think it has to be that way, but the alternatives are not easily arrived at. I think intersectionality, if considered as a dialogue between, could be a real space for forging something new. I try to push that in my work as an activist. In my writing, to be honest, I hold myself much more tightly—I think the real work I do is simply to try to tell the truth of my consciousness in as openhearted, vulnerable and ruthless way I can.

A successful poet in your own right, can you tell us more about your writing process?

Zadie Smith, who—as well as being a wonderful novelist—writes for me are what are perhaps some of the best personal and critical essays of our times, said something about writing or being a writer that I loved. “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.” That was from a list she made—a great list—of advice to writers. 

I think that is pretty much my writing process. I try to tell the truth. I resign myself to being disappointed, because of course to convey the truth you can’t simply tell it, you have to eke it out of yourself through all kinds of indirection and necessary discretion, tempered, I think, by a willingness to be ruthless, and mostly with yourself, which involves a lot of failure—moments when you don’t get it right or just aren’t up to the task. 

I still find the production of a poem mysterious. I draft quickly and write a lot of drafts very quickly, but I revise very slowly. I have friends who are the other way around, but whichever way you choose, I think you have to work hard in the end. I also read a lot because nothing inspires me to want to write more than someone else’s beautiful poem. Yet that only helps to some degree,  because to be good—though you never entirely know if you are good—you have to be willing to listen and nurture that small stubborn self that knows something—what? That’s the hard part, pinning down that “what” that no one else knows.

As Split This Rock’s 10th Annual Poetry Contest Judge, tell us what you look for in a poem.

What I look for in a poem?  I have no idea until I find it. I like to be surprised. I like writers who weigh words in their own unique way. I think the work of a poet happens in much the same way as pearls are said to be made—something irritates or upsets you, or you just don’t understand it, and you spend a long time playing words, language until you find a way to get at that thing, maybe in part by suppressing it or not directly stating it, or only expressing it, in a way that also transforms it into an experience that contains something ineffable, a sense of the mystery of being. I like works that reframe ideas or experiences for me in ways that make me reconsider or renter that experience. I like poets who are vulnerable and also in complete authority. I like to hear a voice, a particular voice in a poem. Maybe that’s what I like most of all, the sense of a voice speaking as if through me in a way I have never heard something spoken before.

Outside of the world of poetry, what brings you joy?

I think writing a good poem—rare as a butterfly on your hand—well, that is still one of my great joys. My others—in no particular order:

• I like to go sit in a dark bar with a good friend and one delicious cocktail
• I like to cook. I read once that Hanif Kureishi (the author of “My Beautiful Laundrette”) complained in his divorce from his second or third wife that she read cookbooks in bed, and I thought, “But that’s me, I read cookbooks in bed!” Reading cookbooks in bed makes me happy.
• I like to go to movies alone in the middle of the afternoon.
• I like to read.
• I like to hang out in the kitchen with my children.
• I like to go to museums and look at one painting for half an hour and then leave.
• I like to travel almost anywhere.  I think most, if not all, of the happiest times of my life have been when I was on the road or in a motel or hotel room or a borrowed house in a city I didn’t know.

All these things do give me joy—even if it is sometimes a slightly melancholic joy. 

What would you like to be known for and how would you like to be described?

I am fifty-five, and I am feeling that pressure of age—a pressure to know who I am and what I’m about, which I don’t entirely, except, maybe I would like to be more fun as I go on. I’d love to be described one day as  a wild and reckless old woman, who people visit just because she is good fun—someone capable of joy. That and a good friend, a decent mother, an activist, a poet who tries,

All things considered that is probably more than enough.

Split This Rock Interview with 2016 Festival Featured Poet Rigoberto González

First in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, 2016. Pre-registration available at Split This Rock's website until March 31.

by M. F. Simone Roberts, Poetry & Social Justice Fellow

Rigoberto González, author of 17 books of prose and poetry and avid book reviewer, has graciously agreed to judge Split This Rock’s 2016 Poetry Contest. We are doubly lucky that he agreed to give a featured reading at the 2016 Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in April 14-17, here in DC. The poet he chooses to win the 2016 contest will also read at the festival during one of our free poetry readings in the evenings.

Before we dive in, I want to let our readers know that I tend to wonder about what people think might be possible, even wildly imaginary, solutions or improvements to our problems. I think many are fully aware of problems facing us in this time. At this point, I’m interested in where poets or advocates want to go – what their neighborhoods in the beloved community look like. Also, my frames of reference come from the avant-garde literary tradition and European philosophers. I've tried to structure some of these questions to reach from that background toward the frames of reference González presents in his poetics, and then let things happen. In this way, traditions that don't often talk to each other in public might begin to communicate.

Because we focus on poetry that witnesses for and fosters social justice, on issues that affect a wide range of communities, urgency is a primary quality. González is like many in this community of poets -- he knows he's writing to save lives, his own and many others, from the hazards of the global economic dislocation we call "illegal immigration," to the particular menace US society presents to queer people, and people of color, and queer people of color, to the deeply dysfunctional relationship between our current civilization and the natural world that supports and surpasses it. In the taut beauty of the poetry I spend my time with here at Split This Rock, there is one constant demand -- to live, to thrive.

I hope the interview that follows highlights the ways that Rigoberto González works on the side of life. I hope also that it leads you to go buy and read his poetry and fiction. I have been re-reading Unpeopled Eden and Our Lady of the Crossword, and poems on the internet -- obsessively.

* * *

Simone Roberts : If you don’t mind, we might start in the practical realm. A central element of our mission is to bring poetry back to the center of public life in the US. As Split This Rock goes forward, we’re looking for ways to enliven connections between the poetry and advocacy/activism communities, so I want to ask you about this connection or interplay in your work. What’s your dynamic between these ways of being a citizen, how do you take poetry into your activism or vice versa? Or maybe you don't?

Rigoberto González : As a queer person of color and an immigrant, it’s impossible not to view my writing through a political lens, and that’s exactly how it should be considered. As an artist, that is what I take to my craft—my memories, my journey thus far, my political leanings and my literary education, much of which is the work of other political voices: queer, feminist, ethnic, etc. My identity will not be separated from my imagination. One of my many concerns has been to express myself as a queer body of color, as an immigrant, to make these identities visible and voiced because there’s a dangerous sentiment out there that wants to silence those voices, make invisible those bodies. I am not afraid of declaring my work political because I have no choice. I will not hide or apologize or disguise where I am coming from, who I am. I learned this courage from the poets and writers who came before me.

SR : I'm a huge fan of your imperative that readers and writers need to read broadly. In one interview you said you tell your students to “never be caught off-guard” when someone mentions a writer. The fiction writer Carole Maso's character Ava reads "promiscuously," allows all kinds of collisions and attractions among writers, styles, periods. The point being to make literary contact with as many different kinds of people / writers / styles as you can. It’s a way of honoring differences, reading outside one’s VEN-diagram of identities and one's tradition. We have readers who will be in the know, but would you describe for others the most vital or surprising trends you see in Latino and Chicano poetry, a few writers you would like us all to drop everything and read right now?

RG : Before I discuss Latino literature and drop some names, I’d like to add that I also insist that my students read works in translation. Not only is it a good way to expand their literary map, but also to understand that American culture is one thread in an extraordinary tapestry of cultures that will enrich their education. I ask them to start with the Nobel Laureates and work their way into the various countries, continents and eras. One trend in Latino poetry that I’ve been pleased about is the growing participation of young voices whose ancestry is Central American or South American. The largest groups within the category of Latino are Chicano, Cuban and Puerto Rican, so it’s great to see writers like Javier Zamora (who was born in El Salvador but who writes in English) and Juan J. Morales (who is of Peruvian and Puerto Rican ancestry)—his book The Siren World was recently released-- and the Panamanian American poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes. Also, Maya Chinchilla, the Guatemalan American author of The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética. Recently, I’ve been excited by the work of Chicana poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico (read The Verging Cities) and Puerto Rican poet Urayoán Noel’s Buzzing Hemisphere/ Rumor Hemisférico.  

SR : I was jealous of the questions Bernard Lumpkin asked you in your 2013 Lambda Literary interview – they were so good. I want to extend in a few directions from one of them having to do with identity. Lumpkin asked why Maui (the protagonist in the Mariposa Trilogy , a series of young adult novels about a young genderqueer Hispanic man) in Mariposa Gown participates in a worker’s rights demonstration, and you answered with the great point that he is not the “center of one story, he is a participant in a network of stories.” One way to go with this idea is abstract: what do you see happening with the rich trends we call “identity politics” and “intersectionality” these days, and are you encouraged by the trends you see?

RG : Yes. Because it shows we are learning from our own communities. Our communities are so endogamous that the multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic identities are not perceived as unusual anymore. Our young people are embracing intersectional identity in ways that are so complex that they are changing the language, the literary landscape. I’m also referring to the trans and gender-fluid communities, to the Afro-Latino communities, which keep showing us that the homogeneity of any kind has always been a fallacy. I am particularly amazed by our trans communities that continue to lead despite the dangers and despite our willful ignorance. The trans communities are so far ahead of us, we need to stop and listen.     

SR : When you imagine a world that’s a good place for queer and transgender people, what are the qualities of that world?

RG : As much as we struggle for acceptance and freedom, I believe that in the end we are simply looking for that space where we can communicate, interact and even disagree without the loaded language or baggage of difference and misunderstanding. I believe that’s why the page—that beautiful place of expression—is so attractive to many of us writers. We continually create that world, we are constantly situating ourselves within it, and we hope that our reality will mirror that imagined space.

SR : I am fan of many ideas of “decentering,” of not making oneself or one’s kind the center to every other margin. One of my favorite French philosophers who works on gender implores her readers to each have our own Copernican Revolution and stop imagining ourselves as the Earth before we understood we go around the Sun. So, another direction to take this question is less abstract: who are authors, or works, you’ve encountered who are good at writing in or through their many stories? At decentering, or making more complex the expression of their identity?

RG : The Chinana writers Alma Luz Villanueva, Helena María Viramontes and Denise Chávez immediately come to mind. Their fictional narratives are richly layered with multiple perspectives so that everyone has a voice and the result is this collective of experiences that teach us how, even in shared space, within the same community, there are multiple planes of being. In poetry, I have to single out the poet Ai, one of my early champions and also a significant literary influence. She never wrote autobiographical poems, but that didn’t mean she didn’t write about herself. Instead, she looked at the struggles, anxieties and demons of her creations as a way to understand the contexts of her own curiosities and questions. And like I noted earlier: translation is always an excellent way to decenter the self as an American identity. There’s no better passport than a book in translation.

SR : The imagery in Unpeopled Eden relates to this question of expanded identity. It’s written in the voices of dead and the “dead” -- people who are marginalized. Especially in poems like "La Pelona as Birdwoman," the starkness, the violence of it remind me of Arthur Rimbaud, a 19th century French poet who came from the provinces and the working class, was queer, and who wrote from perspectives and in voices that French poetry had never heard before. Also, neither of you offer any warning, or explanatory apparatus. This jarring language is the language for the world of these poems, which is not the world the readers know. Both you and Rimbaud insist readers either learn that language or remain strangers. They’re poems that are secure in their “otherness.”

... I've taken

all the antifreeze.

A puddle thick with red--

she'll kneel

next to my wounds

and pray for me,

a string of pigeon skulls

her rosary.

By dawn our bone pieta

breaks out of its shadow,

unleashes its cicada cry.

Like Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, this is a journey to realms where the living, or those who make themselves unavailable to trouble, grief, cruelty, to cannot go. This isn’t about influence. I wonder about the capacity of your language in this book. You've built a language for yourself that, like Rimbaud's but in a contemporary way, slams loss and love and violence and grief and sex and beauty and fragility all right next each other -- it's how your poetry arrives at its own realism. When did you feel this style or voice coming to you in your poetry, and was it surprising? For you, how do you feel it interacts with what's real, whether that's the radical insecurity of the migra or the half-life of people who live too close to death?

RG : I’m quite pleased that you responded to the language of the book because it required so much labor to achieve. Another way to think about the dead (who are not dead) is through my preferred trope: ghosts. In many ethnic cultures, ghosts are the manifestations of those things mysterious, unresolved, of those relationships unreconciled, things left unsaid and undone, that haunt us for life. I frequently explore death in my work and I wanted to find another way to sift through the rubble. Unpeopled Eden was a particularly difficult book to write because what haunted me was my father’s death. I am currently writing a third book about my relationship with my father, not because I want answers, but because I want to understand what happened. I knew then that I need to speak about our relationship in a language that communicated with the ghost of my father’s presence and absence in my life. I gathered the images, the shards and fragments, and pieced them together, like that string of pigeon skulls that make a rosary.  I kept at it, gathering and weaving, until this imagined world, this surreal landscape became real—the place where my father and I could meet, two beings from different planes of existence (what we had always been, even while he was alive), and talk.

SR : This one's a little more complicated, but still on the identity-difference theme. Buddhists think of the self as a practice or a collection of activities or habits that can be changed (though not easily). A handful of Western philosophers (without Buddhism) have attempted to shift or open their collection of habits in really brutal ways. Rimbaud promoted a “derangement of the senses." He meant to sort of shake and reorder his physical senses, but also his sense of meaning. He lived in a time of huge social and economic change, and wanted to make himself over, and to write poetry in completely new ways. He was also very confrontational in relation to “tradition” and class and the kinds of politeness that choke down change.  

In the 20th century, this kind of thing gets to be a normal method and takes on very political overtones. The Situationist International used détournment (loosely: flipping the script, culture jamming) and dérive (loosely: drifting through social or public spaces with vastly different vibes) to challenge common expectations of a capitalist society and imagine other ways of being and doing. But, détournment doesn't just mean looking critically at the world. It means engaging with it in really disruptive ways that force the mind and body, and other people, to engage with, say, a clothing boutique or a residential urban street, or a fancy restaurant in unconventional, even violent ways. Ideally, this process eventually affects “the system.” These are possibly self-harming methods, and often involved drugs like mescaline or LSD. But, Rimbaud and others in this line thought of these brutal practices as almost spiritual kinds of re-shaping a self, re-making the world.

Certainly, reading can be a gentler kind of mental unsettling and shuffling. I wonder if you think about practices for opening up more elements of ourselves, or opening to other kinds of people or the world that might benefit individuals? And, how you feel those ways of being open "scale up" or might be tweaked for various communities in the US? I mean, beyond reading. Is it possible that we need something more radical than what we've tried before?

RG : If we’re now moving into the social sphere, then the alternative is a shift in leadership and release of control of the dominant narrative. In the U.S., whiteness is still the center. Heteronormativity is still the center. Those two elements are being unsettled because there are hostile and vocal reactions to what assumes a position of power or visibility that does not fit the desired profile—hello, Obama, hello gay marriage. But to bring it closer to home, let’s consider the growth of the Latino population in the U.S., and how the representation in politics is growing, but not sizeable—not yet. That fear, of the browning of America, is what’s bringing to the forefront all of these racist political candidates who are enabling racist reactions to a group that, tough cookies, is here to stay, and grow and grow and grow. What should be happening is communication, not pushback, otherwise whiteness will continue to be perceived as an obstacle, not a potential collaborator or ally, which will only bring more conflict and strife. But I don’t want to come across as simplistic by saying representation and inclusion are key (though they are necessary). Rather, I think we need to challenge all those binaries, move away from the black or white world, from the this or thats of our everyday interactions. This is where I place my faith on the young. As digital natives, as a population that is experiencing the complicated world during their formative years, it is they who will show us how it’s done. So instead of singling out class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, let me celebrate the guidance of the young who must live with the damage the rest of us have made. We owe these young people so many apologies. Yet I am inspired by them—they will have helped us reconfigure, reimagine, rethink our world. So that’s a long-winded way of saying, I am not sure I have the answer to your question, but I am positive the next generation will be more useful than I have been.  

SR :  I want to ask you a handful of questions about the writer's life. You mentioned in your PEN Ten interview that a way writers hurt themselves is by sitting in bad chairs and slouching. Your solution was an ergonomic sitting ball, to keep your back in good alignment. You got me thinking about self-care for writers, and activists, who work on painful issues, who live in communities so pressed with grief these days. Times are always like this, sure, but I think each era is like this in its own thorny way. What do you feel is particular about this era and the self-care required to confront it? I’m thinking of state violence and the Movement for Black Lives, emboldened conservative attacks on all levels of women’s autonomy, of the terrifying violence against transgender men and women. There's a lot of exhaustion going around.

RG :  Activist fatigue, I believe it’s called, this inundation of language and imagery that keeps hammering the negative—it fuels desperation and anxiety. Social media, for all the good that it has achieved (such as empower people with the ability to disseminate information and amplify voice) also has its downside. I have been active on Twitter and I have to remind myself that this is a tool that filters and funnels, that it is only one view of the complicated world I inhabit. I imagine Facebook (which I never joined) is the same. As are the circles we run in, the social groups we cultivate. It can become so easy to narrow our own vision. That is why I have friendships and participate in activities that are somewhat removed from the political quadrant I engage in. We keep emphasizing allies, but we should keep our networks expansive, our safe spaces varied and our interactions as diverse as possible. And as much as we have become addicted to social media, it’s healthy to step away from it. I have gotten into the habit of stepping out without my phone, whenever I can. It feels heavenly.

SR : You're comfortable and accomplished in several genres. How does it go for you, feeling out which idea or kind of meaning needs to take form as fiction, or poetry, or essay?

RG : This many books later, it’s not that difficult for me to decide what platform is best for the idea that’s spinning around my mind. I know that if it’s personal it’s going to be served best by memoir; if it’s an image, it will find its home in a poem; if it’s a character, it will become fiction. There is so much overlap—I do love employing image and poetic language in prose, I do employ characters in my poetry, but that usually takes place at a different point in the writing process. In the beginning I had so many false starts, but now I usually think about it so clearly and have written so much that I know before the first word is written what it’s going to be. That doesn’t necessarily mean there will be no surprises in the writing, there always are. If there are not, it’s not worth sharing.

SR : Three closing questions. Kind of like Proust’s ten questions, but shorter. 1) What do you think of paradox and fluidity? 2) What makes you most content? 3) What's your writing snack? You've said before that you often write late at night into the wee hours. This must require sustenance. So, what does the body want when writing?

RG : 1) I prefer the term complexity, and I use it liberally, even in my conversations. I believe complexity is the most honest representation of human behavior. It doesn’t make people easier to understand, but it does allow us to acknowledge their contradictions, changes of heart, etc. No one is from another planet, no one is an alien. 2) I actually confessed to someone recently that I am most happy when I am reading, writing, or talking about books. The first two are solitary, the third is more social, but the common denominator is imagination. I am most content when I am motivated by imagination. 3) I need my protein: nuts, Greek yogurt, peanut butter, and caffeinated tea.  

Thank you, Rigoberto, for the generosity of your responses and sharing your time and mind with us. It's particularly wonderful that you shared your insight into the generations now growing into their own, and the re-imagining of life, of power, of being together happening among young queer and transgender poets and thinkers! In this time, it's good to be reminded that the radical imagination is still alive, that we will owe our queer and transgender deep gratitude going forward. All these beautiful and inevitable shifts are happening, and the old systems of symbols and power feel it, but I'm sure we can outlast them. Like your inhabitants of Mictlán we may have to become real strangers to this world, but we can outlast them. Those who cling to the old regime will be so surprised when the next era of social being is established and they find themselves so unharmed. But, thank you mostly for the sustenance of your poetry, of all your writing. The poet's who submit to our poetry contest this year are lucky to have such a poet considering their work. We look forward to hearing you read your loving and brutal poems in the spring at the festival. Be well.

* * *

Rigoberto González is author of four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His ten books of prose include bilingual children's books, young adult novels, and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He edited Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and Alurista's new Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and many other accolades, he is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. In 2015, he received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle.

Visit his website to learn more: RigobertoGonzález.com.

González has given a number of great interviews. Search for them, and you won't have wasted your time. Here's a selection of interviews I found particularly powerful.

Fate of the Writer at The Rumpus

The PEN Ten at PEN American Center

Poets Forum 2014, Rigoberto González, for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at Academy of American Poets

Populating the Bookshelves by Bernard Lumpkin at Lambda Literary

Sitting Down at Rutgers

Spotlight on Hispanic Writers interview and reading at Library of Congress

M. F. Simone Roberts is the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow for Split This Rock. Roberts is an independent scholar of experimental poetics and feminist phenomenology, a poet, editor, and activist. She is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays and author of the monograph A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray's Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetics. Her poems are coming soon to a journal near you. Descendant of both aristocrats and serfs, she adventures this world with her consort, Adam Silverman.

2016 Poetry Contest

Announcing the 9th Annual Split This Rock Poetry Contest

Judged by: Rigoberto González

 

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Benefits Split This Rock Poetry Festival
April 14-17, 2016

$1,000 Awarded for poems of provocation & witness

DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 1, 2015

Submit Online! 

PRIZES: First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. 

First place recipient receives $500 and the opportunity to read the selected poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016; second and third place receive $250 each. All three winners receive 2016 festival registration and their poems will be published at www.SplitThisRock.org and within The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Up to three honorable mentions will be selected.  

DEADLINE: November 1, 2015

READING FEE: $20, which supports Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016.

Themes: Submissions should be in the spirit of Split This Rock: socially engaged poems, poems that reach beyond the self to connect with the larger community or world; poems of provocation and witness. This theme can be interpreted broadly and may include but is not limited to work addressing politics, economics, government, war, leadership; issues of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, body image, immigration, heritage, etc.); community, civic engagement, education, activism; and poems about history, Americana, cultural icons. Visit Split This Rock's website to read 2015 and other past winning poems if you are still unclear regarding themes.

Ethics: Split This Rock subscribes to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Contest Code of Ethics. Read it online here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

If Submittable is not accessible to you, please contact us at info@splitthisrock.org or (202) 787-5210 for instructions on how to email your submission to us. It is important that we know about your situation before receiving your mailed or emailed entry. Please allow sufficient time for your submission to be received.

ABOUT THE JUDGE:

Rigoberto González is author of four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His ten books of prose include bilingual children's books, young adult novels, and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He edited Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and Alurista's new Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and many other accolades, he is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. In 2015, he received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Submit up to 3 unpublished poems, no more than 6 pages total, no more than 1 poem per page, in any style, in the spirit of Split This Rock (see above). Visit Split This Rock's Submittable page for instructions.

What we mean by “unpublished”: We accept only poems that have not yet been included in a publication with an ISBN number or online via a juried journal or website. If your poem is selected and it is posted on social media, we ask that you take it down prior to our publishing contest results.

We read blind. Please do not put your name or contact information on the document you upload to Submittable or within its title or your poems will be in jeopardy of being disqualified.

Simultaneous submissions are OK, but please notify us immediately if the poem is accepted elsewhere.

Late entries will not be accepted.

Submissions need to be received by 11:59pm on November 1, 2015, Eastern Standard Time.

Close friends, relatives, students, and former students of the judge are excluded from the contest. Likewise, the current Board of Directors, staff, teaching artists, and DC Slam Team of Split This Rock are excluded, as are members of their immediate families. (For more detail: visit the code of ethics on our website.)

Mailed and Emailed Submissions: Except for special circumstances we are aware of in advance, we do not accept mailed submissions.

We encourage you to submit before the November 1 deadline so that if you encounter problems we can assist you.

Submit Online at Submittable!

Please contact us directly if you are unable to access Submittable at 

(202) 787-5210 or info@splitthisrock.org. 

For more information:   

(202) 787-5210
info@splitthisrock.org 

http://splitthisrock.submittable.com/submit