Alien | Desgraciado |
| When I heard this word first thrown around in conversation, my family’s Spanish cracked to let in this strange stretch of cautious whisper, the weather changed in my mind. I’d read of spaceships, of planets so advanced you could travel freely, no stopping to be asked about citizenship, no stone face behind a badge peering to where I sat in the backseat. The world became another place. The word wetback began to bring to mind the scene where the dark creature burst from a woman’s stomach in a movie. The sky grew overcast in my mother’s eyes, kept her inside, when someone talked of borders. Rosaries turned secret communicators. Prayers: reports of worry and want. Each crucifix, a satellite. Before, I would stand outside and look at what I felt to be not empty space but an open window to another life. Now, another life invaded. There were people with papers, and there were people without. There were questions I was told the answers to should they come up. There were stories I was asked to forget. When my mother pressed the silver face of St. Jude into my palm, I felt the weight of it, the cold and unfamiliar feel of what I didn’t know. | A wine grown where I was born would be made of sweat and dust and be drunk all afternoon. Let’s call it: Desgraciado. I’m also made of sweat and dust, of leaving and of gathering behind slurred speech, a desgraciado and a sinverguenza called. The night gathers and leaves voices in tejano songs talking of loss. Without shame, I visit my mother and ask for cash, then go. I’m made of songs playing on nights where family faces turn to bottle gleam. My mother’s cash buys me a night where the city dwindles to bottle-gleam and unfamiliar turns along the freeway. I become a dwindled thought leaving the city, a window’s rattled breath. The turns along the freeway come back to me when I awake to window-rattle, one leg out, and one foot on the brake. Back in my driveway, awake with a memory of salt and wind, and backwash, my head’s about to break. Anyone else would laugh. My memory’s crumbled salt, wind. A wine grown where I was born ferments with would-be laughter. I rise to drink down the afternoon. |
Mini Interview with José Angel Araguz
When you published your work with us in 2016, you noted several inspirations for the two poems, the first being a racist ad by a congressional candidate and the other being a line from Sharon Olds' book, ˆStag's Leap." What is inspiring your work now? What do you find yourself returning to?
Currently, I am finding inspiration from the community-centered conversation and advocacy actions that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police brutality and oppression. As with “Alien” and its original inspiration tied to a politician’s racist campaign ad, my current work is braided with the urgency and conscience necessary to respond to the moment. What are the questions that need to be asked? What are the stories that need to be told? What nuances tied to human experience are being missed by headlines and newspeak? These greater conversations are also having parallel upsets in our smaller literary world. For me, the questioning and interrogation of traditions and practices of gatekeeping translate to a greater nerve and freedom on the page. I am also being inspired by the conversations I have with students in my current summer courses. The theme I’ve chosen is “Dear America: the present moment’s lit(erature)” and my own conviction is boosted by how my students are here for and awake to this conversation.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
One piece of advice that I come back to is letting a poem teach you how to read it/write it. This humility before words—someone else’s and one’s own—continues to be crucial to me years after having it pointed out by my friend, the late Dennis Flinn, almost twenty years ago. It helps frame the reading act and the creative act as something that we are a part of, something we can’t take full credit for, something that we tap into and share in through being present. I work to practice this spirit in every writing space I engage in, the classroom, the stage, and beyond.
As for advice for writers submitting work, I encourage folks to do the work of finding your readers and communities. Don’t be limited by any ideas of “top-tier” or prestige; there’s a whole world of writers and readers out there who need your work. It’s too easy to get lost in award or publication envy. But are people reading you? That’s where your work lives, in being read.
Also: Be kind to yourselves and your work. While even my response to this question necessarily takes on a prescriptive tone, avoid hard and fast rules about what you should or shouldn’t do as a writer. As a friend of mine is fond of saying: “We can should ourselves to death if we’re not careful.” Be present for your work when it needs you, but don’t force anything that puts you or it at risk. During the pandemic, there’s been wild conversations across a range of reactions: from people who can’t write and are bewildered at those who can, to people who are bewildered at those who can’t write at this time. The creative self, like the heart, can’t be commanded, not in any direction.
What are you currently working on?
I’m shopping around a poetry collection focused on life circa pre/post the 2016 election as well as a fragmented memoir. I’m always working on projects. One is a book of what I term lyric aphorisms; another is a poetry collection based on experiences with religious ideas that framed my childhood; another is a poetry collection written in Spanish, exploring what that voice sounds like for me, the voice I speak to family with but otherwise rarely speak with. I’m also exploring more creative nonfiction forms. Really, it’s about finding the form(s) that a piece wants to exist in, doing that work to get there. And, of course, I keep working on the almighty and interminable to-do list, ha.
Currently, I am finding inspiration from the community-centered conversation and advocacy actions that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police brutality and oppression. As with “Alien” and its original inspiration tied to a politician’s racist campaign ad, my current work is braided with the urgency and conscience necessary to respond to the moment. What are the questions that need to be asked? What are the stories that need to be told? What nuances tied to human experience are being missed by headlines and newspeak? These greater conversations are also having parallel upsets in our smaller literary world. For me, the questioning and interrogation of traditions and practices of gatekeeping translate to a greater nerve and freedom on the page. I am also being inspired by the conversations I have with students in my current summer courses. The theme I’ve chosen is “Dear America: the present moment’s lit(erature)” and my own conviction is boosted by how my students are here for and awake to this conversation.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
One piece of advice that I come back to is letting a poem teach you how to read it/write it. This humility before words—someone else’s and one’s own—continues to be crucial to me years after having it pointed out by my friend, the late Dennis Flinn, almost twenty years ago. It helps frame the reading act and the creative act as something that we are a part of, something we can’t take full credit for, something that we tap into and share in through being present. I work to practice this spirit in every writing space I engage in, the classroom, the stage, and beyond.
As for advice for writers submitting work, I encourage folks to do the work of finding your readers and communities. Don’t be limited by any ideas of “top-tier” or prestige; there’s a whole world of writers and readers out there who need your work. It’s too easy to get lost in award or publication envy. But are people reading you? That’s where your work lives, in being read.
Also: Be kind to yourselves and your work. While even my response to this question necessarily takes on a prescriptive tone, avoid hard and fast rules about what you should or shouldn’t do as a writer. As a friend of mine is fond of saying: “We can should ourselves to death if we’re not careful.” Be present for your work when it needs you, but don’t force anything that puts you or it at risk. During the pandemic, there’s been wild conversations across a range of reactions: from people who can’t write and are bewildered at those who can, to people who are bewildered at those who can’t write at this time. The creative self, like the heart, can’t be commanded, not in any direction.
What are you currently working on?
I’m shopping around a poetry collection focused on life circa pre/post the 2016 election as well as a fragmented memoir. I’m always working on projects. One is a book of what I term lyric aphorisms; another is a poetry collection based on experiences with religious ideas that framed my childhood; another is a poetry collection written in Spanish, exploring what that voice sounds like for me, the voice I speak to family with but otherwise rarely speak with. I’m also exploring more creative nonfiction forms. Really, it’s about finding the form(s) that a piece wants to exist in, doing that work to get there. And, of course, I keep working on the almighty and interminable to-do list, ha.
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and, most recently, An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His poems, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, New South, Poetry International, and The Bind. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and composes erasure poems on the Instagram account @poetryamano. He is a faculty member in Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA program. With an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, José is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine.