in the Atlantic, spinning itself into nothingness,
dissipating under its own destructive power.
— from “Post Hurricane
Miami,”
Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco
The above photo and the following bio were found on the poet's website:
https://arielfranciscopoetry.wordpress.com
Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke
(C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass
Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he
was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University.
Ariel Francisco is
a first generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. He is
currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is
the editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine and also the winner
of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and
elsewhere.
__________
I've never met Ariel Francisco. When poet
friend, Kate Fadick's chapbook, Self-Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen, became available for preorder from Glass
Poetry Press, I learned that Editor Anthony Frame was offering a purchase deal
on all the chapbooks he would publish in the first series, so I subscribed, and
discovered Francisco's poetry in that series. —Karen L. George
You can read a review of Ariel Francisco book Before Snowfall, After Rain here.
(This interview was conducted via email.)
__________
One of the qualities I
especially enjoy about chapbooks vs. poetry collections is that chapbooks,
especially one as exquisite as yours, are so effective in creating a cohesive work,
a concentration that resonates in each poem and in the poems as a whole. Every
time I read your chapbook, I notice more connections or threads woven through
it by the use of repeated imagery and themes that deepen and illuminate your
work. What do you like and/or dislike about this short poetry form?
AF: That’s actually
really interesting because I was working on my thesis (which turned into my
forthcoming full length collection, All
My Heroes Are Broke) when I was approached about publishing a chapbook. I
had another project I was working on which was about chapbook length, but
ultimately decided to construct something from the poems in my thesis instead.
So while I didn’t write it as a chapbook, or with a chapbook in mind, I had a
lot to work with which presented ample opportunities to create connects and
threads throughout. It was difficult but also a lot of fun, essentially paring
60 pages of poems down to 20, and then trying to figure out an order. I think I
decided on the title first, for example, so that set the opening poem and
closing poem in place, and I just worked my way inwards from there.
What I love about chapbooks is their ability to create and
sustain these threads throughout the poems, whatever they may be. I don’t want
to say it’s easier to do in chapbook than a full length book because I don’t
want to diminish it, but it does make more sense to do that in a smaller space.
I think that’s part of the reason why chapbooks are becoming more popular. It’s
a slightly different medium where one can accomplish something different, and
there are a lot of talented poets out there publishing very cool, very strange,
and very beautiful chapbooks.
In your poems you
mention the poets Baudelaire, Bukowski, Lorca, and James Wright. Are these some
of your favorite poets, or ones that particularly influenced you, and if so, can you tell us what you particularly admire about them?
Or if these are not favorite poets of yours, what are some of your favorite or
most influential poets, and why?
AF: They’re poets
that I’ve read pretty well at different points in my life. Of those, James Wright
has had the biggest influence on me, even for the style of these kinds of
poems— engaging with them directly instead of just writing a poem in their
style, or after them, which seems more common. I’m thinking, for example, of
Wright’s “As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter,
I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor,” which alludes to Po Chu-I (another
poet I really love). I also got this from Campbell McGrath, one of my teachers
and mentors, who is always bringing in poets of the past into in his own poems
whether it's James Wright or Richard Hugo or Emily Dickinson or Frank O’Hara. I
think seeing it in his work sort of gave me permission to do it in my own, and
it’s a lot of fun. Not to mention it gave me more poets to look up and read
when I was younger. Reading Campbell’s “James Wright, Richard Hugo, the
Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest” was the first time I had heard of
those two poets, for example.
Also, a lot of it is
just true, and I often use that as a jumping off point for poems. Where it
takes me is another story but I did find that Baudelaire book and mail it to
someone that never got it, and I was reading James Wright on the L when that
dude started throwing up on himself.
What drew you to
poetry? What inspires you to write
poetry?
AF: I didn’t start
writing poetry until I started college. I’d been reading incessantly since I
learned how to read, though I never read poetry until my senior year of high
school. In AP English, I remember hating
T.S. Eliot but really enjoying Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and that was
pretty much it. Going into college, I knew that being just a reader wasn’t a
real thing, so I figured writing was the logical progression. Though I’d mostly
read fiction and novels, I had no interest in writing it, at all. It seemed
strange at the time, but I found absolutely no correlation between reading
fiction and wanting to write it, whereas reading even just that little bit of
poetry (most of it being The Waste Land,
which again, I hated) seemed to just make more sense to me, I think because it
struck me more as a sense-making endeavor. I could obviously understand why
people read novels but I couldn’t fathom why someone would want to write one, whereas poetry right away
made sense from both angles.
I remember before taking an Intro to Creative Writing
course in my first semester of college, I went to Barnes and Noble to check out
the poetry section (I guess even then, I knew I had to read more poetry in
order to ever get good at it) to see if I could something that would interest
me. First, I found Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (the affordable B&C
classics version, which I still love). Then, in a moment of befuddlement and
sheer job, I found Plath’s Ariel
which I had no idea existed. Imagining thinking “I’ll give this poetry thing a
try” and then finding your own name on a book by one of only three poets you’ve
read. I took this as a good omen and signed up for a workshop almost every
semester in undergrad, and just kept writing, which was great because I had
failed chemistry and college algebra in my first semester, and switched my
major from Marine Biology to English (long story).
What inspires me to write poetry is just the desire to
make sense of my life, which I think is the source of a lot of art. It’s as
reflective and analytical as it is creative for me, so when I get it right I
feel like I have created something and solved something else.
I wanted to ask you about the poem “Perhaps it
Wasn’t Such a Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger’s story that is referenced
in the epigraph is so haunting, and I found your poem haunting as well. The
ending image stuck with me, of the “I” of the poem searching the hotel windows,
“ears perked / for the sound of a muffled gunshot.” But I was equally struck by
the image near the center of the poem, where, after seeing this man at the
beach who “stands in the foam staring at his feet, / hiding his toes in the
cold froth,” you say, “I lay Salinger’s / ‘Nine Stories’ in the bird-pocked
sand.” The poem doesn’t spell out what the story of the man standing in the
ocean might be, or of the other person in the poem who is reading Salinger’s
“Nine Stories.” Yet they’re connected by being in the same place at this exact
moment. And by how the man standing in the ocean suggests the male character in
Salinger’s story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which is a story in the
collection “Nine Stories.” The “muffled gunshot” in the poem also echoes the
ending of Salinger’s story, where the troubled man leaves the beach, goes into
his hotel room and shoots himself.
But I’m curious about why
the “I” of the poem lays the story collection “in the bird-pocked sand.” We
don’t know if he lays it there temporarily, or is, as it were “done” with the
book, himself haunted by the story. I had the curious idea that maybe the
“reader” I’ll call him/her, thinks this man on the beach is troubled in some
way, and that maybe this book of stories is just what he might need. I’m
curious what you meant to suggest by his laying of the book in the sand. It’s
such an evocative image, as is the effect of the scene of this beach mirroring
the scene in Salinger’s story.
AF: This is a
really great question and I feel bad that I can’t give a very long answer to
it. On the one hand, I think he’s putting the book down to reflect. Given the
setting of the story, I think he is perhaps imagining that he is on the very
same beach that Seymour killed himself on and is maybe revisiting the story in
his head, imposing it on his current surroundings. I think he sees the man
hiding his toes in the water, that’s for the reader (also hopefully reminiscent
of Seymour accusing the woman in the elevator of staring at his toes). I like
the idea of the reader thinking the book might help this troubled man but the
“I” is too lost in thought to notice him, unfortunately.
In your 2014 “Gulf Stream
Literary Magazine” interview with Tony Hoagland, he says at one point in the
conversation, “Poems are like clues that have been left for us along the road,
little packages that have been left which anybody might find. You might read a poem, like I did, by W.S.
Merwin, many years ago and say, ‘this man knows what I’ve been looking for, and
he’s saying what I’ve been waiting for somebody to tell me.’ Our contemporary
poems have the obligation to do that too.”
Do you agree with
Hoagland’s idea, and what do you envision or hope your poems tell its readers?
AF: Oh yeah, I
definitely agree with Tony there. I mean, I think that’s just a fun way of
explaining why we love poems so much. When you read a poem that really
resonates with you, it truly does feel as though the poet has some kind of
secret insight into your life. How could
they know this is exactly how I feel? Right? But it also acknowledges the
extreme subjectability of poetry. There could a poem out there that everyone is
raving about, but you don’t find it to be particularly good or interesting or
resonant. It could be that that poem is not a clue for you.
What I hope for my poems, in the hands and eyes of
readers, is to create a space or atmosphere for the mind to occupy. I think of
them as tiny episodes of a very weird show— the episodes cumulate not necessarily
into a cohesive story but into a larger space. I’m not sure if that makes sense
but I hope people keep watching.
I read that you are the
editor-in-chief of “Gulf Stream Literary Magazine,” and a reader for “The
Indianola Review.” What are some of the elements you look for in submissions,
that make a poem memorable for you?
AF: Speaking
broadly, my favorite kinds of poems are those that seem to communicate a
genuine human experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something true. I
know the speaker or the “I” in a poem isn’t always the poet, but I want to
believe or be convinced that it is. I want to believe that when reading a poem,
the person speaking to me is an actual person telling me something that’s very
important to them. Why is this thing important? Maybe I’m not sure, but if I
believe that it is, I will reread it for reasons.
What poets and/or
collections are you currently reading, and can you tell us what you
particularly like about them?
AF: Oh, too many to name! I’ve been revisiting
Phil Levine, though mostly his collected interviews and essays and various
prose things. His work occupies a real world that I recognize very well (the
working class struggle, etc.), so I’m always coming back to him in some way or
another. Similarly, Adrian Matejka’s new “Map of the Stars” is a book I’ve been
really loving this summer. He seems to dip into memory a lot in this book with
poems about childhood, whether it’s wonder and curiosity (I too was obsessed with
space as a kid) or the struggles of growing up poor, of feeling out of place in
the place you call home. That’s always going to resonate with me.
I understand you have a forthcoming
poetry collection called “All My Heroes Are Broke” that can be pre-ordered now, and
released by C&R Press in September.
Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about this new book?
AF: The book has
epigraph from the rap group Atmosphere, which I think sums it up pretty well:
“I ain’t saying that you never had to struggle for a buck or some luck or some
love, motherfucker join the club.” The poems are essentially about a life in
search of these three things (hence being broke, in more than one sense), not
necessarily finding them, and not necessarily giving up. Briefly, it’s about
being a first generation American and finding that everything kinda sucks.
Do you have any
new projects you are currently at work on?
AF: I’m grinding
away at my second book, and I have poems towards a third and a fourth (they
don’t make sense together). I’m translating some of my dad's poems into
English, which is a really interesting experience. I’m also maybe working on a
chapbook of poems inspired by Cowboy Bebop. And, of course, I am looking for a
job.
* * *
You can read
several of Ariel Francisco's poems below:
___________________________________________________
Karen
George retired
from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence, Kentucky,
and enjoys photography and traveling to historic river towns, mountains, and
Europe. She is author of the poetry
collection Swim Your
Way Back
(Dos Madres Press, 2014), and five chapbooks, most
recently Into the Fire (Blue Lyra Press, 2016) and the collaborative Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press, 2017). You can find her work in Rogue Agent, Blue
Fifth Review, Heron Tree, The
Ekphrastic Review, and America. She holds an MFA from Spalding
University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints. Visit her website: http://karenlgeorge.snack.ws/.
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