Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Precis
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Eau Claire
STATE: WI
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.uwec.edu/Staff/alvergjf/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/jos%C3%A9-felipe-alvergue-phd-50a92248/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born San Salvador, El Salvador; married Stephanie Farrar (an English professor); children: Zava.
EDUCATION:University of California, San Diego, John Muir College, B.A.; California Institute of the Arts, M.F.A.; State University of New York at Buffalo, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, assistant professor of English.
WRITINGS
Also author of us look up / there red dwells (2008).
SIDELIGHTS
Although born in San Salvador, El Salvador, José Felipe Alvergue grew up near the Mexico/U.S. border and lived with his family in Arizona, Utah, and San Diego, California. He is a poet and a college professor who teaches transnational and contemporary literature. Alvergue’s “work reveals a fascination with place and the meanings that emerge from our relationship with our environment,” wrote Full Stop website contributor Emily Anderson.
Alvergue’s first collection of poems is titled gist: rift: drift: bloom. In his next collection of poems, precis, the poems are concerned on one level with the literal border between Mexico and the United States. However, the poems delve into a more philosophical examination of borders or “boundaries between identities, bodies, and communities,” as noted by a Publishers Weekly contributor. VolumeOne website contributor Hannah Mumm remarked that precis “challenges pedestrian border narratives, exposing their myopic erasure of identity in a mélange of poetry, newspaper clippings, and visual art.”
The poems in precis are primarily set in the fictional border town of Sidro, California. The poems revolve around the death of a student who, while crossing the street, is hit by a drunk driver. The inspiration for the poems and story stems from an article that Alvergue once read about a similar death that occurred in San Diego’s Sidro neighborhood when a drunk driver killed Alma Gonzalez, who was thought to be an immigrant. Alvergue eventually discovered the young person killed was the best friend of one of his students. “Jarred by the cavalier maltreatment of her death and many others by the press, he sought to refute the common narratives of criminality and precarity that demonize border town citizens,” wrote VolumeOne website contributor Mumm, who went on to note that in the collection of poems Alvergue uses the girl’s death to act “as a conduit to address systematic injustices.”
Throughout the book, Alvergue refers to newspaper clippings from approximately 1998-2002. Alvergue told Full Stop website contributor Emily Anderson that his interest in this time period primarily was due to policy issues in California during those years and referendums that were appearing on state ballots. Commenting on the policies and referendums, Alvergue told Anderson: “It’s really during this period you began to see the way bodies are criminalized.” Alvergue also noted in the Full Stop interview that ever since that time California has been trying to correct some legislation “but at that period—it was just all fear and all xenophobia.”
In the poems in precis, the dead girl ends up being cast as the criminal, whose disregard for the rules resulted in her jaywalking and getting killed. Meanwhile, the drunk driver is somehow cast in the light of redemption. Alvergue’s poems examine the young girl’s death from various perspectives and angles. Commenting on the collection’s structure, a Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that the “random overlaid quotations and blacked out boxes of texts, imitates and invokes interior confusion.”
In an interview with Alvergue, Chippewa Valley Writers Guild website contributor Jeana Conder commented on the book’s title, which is Spanish for “precise,” and the meaning as “a concise summary of essential points, statements, or facts.” Alvergue told Conder that the word’s definition was “important” to him “when thinking about the composition of the book,” adding, “It’s an indication of knowledge, or knowing when it comes to people, place, and history. But it’s also an indication of genre in the sense that genre choreographs certain cultural expectations, values, and revealed reading practices: for example, the ways a cultural belief around ‘criminality’ or ‘precarity’ forms reading practices related to ‘border literature’ or ‘immigrant literature.’ I want to disrupt the continuity of these expectations with the story/-ies in the book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, March 27, 2017, review of precis, p. 75.
ONLINE
Chippewa Valley Writers Guild Website, http://www.cvwritersguild.org/ (April 18, 2017), Jeana Conder, “Exploring Boundaries and Identities in José Alvergue’s New Book precis.“
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (September 20, 2017), Emily Anderson, “José Felipe Alvergue,” author interview.
VolumeOne, http://volumeone.org/ (April 19, 2017), Hannah Mumm, “Precisely Ambiguous: The Poetic Metamorphosis of a U.S.-Mexico Border Story.”
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Website, http://www.uwec.edu/ (November 27, 2017), author faculty profile.
JOSÉ FELIPE ALVERGUE was born in El Salvador and grew up on the Mexico/US border. He is a graduate of both the Buffalo Poetics and CalArts Writing programs. As a grain of the Central American diaspora he works between text, performance, and archive in mapping the transnationalisms that shape residential identity. josé also teaches transnational and contemporary literature in Wisconsin, and is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloo.
September 20, 2017
José Felipe Alvergue
by Emily Anderson
Recently, I spoke with José Felipe Alvergue, whose second book of poetry, précis, was released from Omnidawn this April. José’s work reveals a fascination with place and the meanings that emerge from our relationship with our environment. His 2015 book, gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works) contemplates language, sound and the landscape of the North American prairies. Similarly, précis unearths a language and politics of place by focusing on the US-Mexico border.
José and I met when we were both poetics students at the University at Buffalo. By a delightful coincidence, José and I now both live in my hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he and his wife, Stephanie Farrar, teach in the English department at the university. José and I discussed précis and the politics of the U.S. Mexico border in his living room. The view from the windows was green and leafy. Cool summer breezes filtered in through the screens. Upstairs, José’s two-year-old napped in a room that did not require air conditioning. We could not be further from the dry, tumbleweedy images that the phrase “U.S.-Mexico border” connotes for someone who, like me, has always lived in northern places.
But, as précis reminds us, the border is everywhere. The politics of nation know no bounds. Currently, in Wisconsin, dairy farmers rely on immigrant labor to make their iconic cheese and everywhere language cuts us into pieces while suggesting new ways to reassemble the world.
Emily Anderson: Your new book of poetry, précis, revolves around the question of the US-Mexico border and explores how the border gives meaning to human bodies and also landscapes. Parts of the book focus on a young woman, Alma Gonzales, who was hit by a drunk driver and killed near the border. You incorporate newspaper clippings about her death as well as a lot of other documents and texts. I notice that you’re situating this project geographically and politically but I also wonder if there is an element of elegy, or how you feel about that term being used.
José Felipe Alvergue: There was this installation project at the border for a while where people were planting these crosses everywhere. The crosses end up standing in for a lot of things. Obviously the cross is the cross, but they were playing on these makeshift altars that would appear by sides of roads when people died . . . it started to mean a lot of things for different communities.
People were seeing it as significant for lives lost as they were trying to cross the border . . . it also represented bodies that were [politically] absent from the border…some people are present as a population but not as a person so much. Near Texas a lot of people were taking them to also represent the missing women from Ciudad Juarez. So a lot of the meanings started to become attached to [the installation], and it really was contextual to region.
So when you’re talking about the book itself being sort of, in itself, a found object equal to the found objects that are in it—yeah, I did want to evacuate authorial meaning so it could then acquire this other kind of phenomenon meaning. Which is really contextual in a lot of ways. I know that is not completely true, because it’s still a book and people have to go and buy it, so there’s kind of a forced context, but that was the idea of it.
So much of that area [the border] begins to acquire a use-meaning. There’s a park that’s right at the border of where the Pacific is called Border Field Park or Monument Park, it always depends on who you ask. It’s supposed to be a state park but it’s always vacant and there’s usually just a border patrol agent taking a nap in a Bronco…there’s never anyone on the US side.
And on the Tijuana side, the city is called Playas de Tijuana, it’s the beach and there’s people using it. I think things acquire meaning through use, and so many of the things that are found along the border are often either just kind of vacant, so you can take advantage of that, and make meaning happen, or the meaning is overly imposed, over-coded.
The new trend in and along that area just because of the cost of land is to put up these outlet malls…it’s like either outlet malls, or kind of expanse. So I wanted to work between these two things, the over-coded and that which is still open for us to relate to it through meaning.
I like what you’re saying about the over-coded vs. the empty; you make a point in the book about the way that immigrant narratives are often over-coded and immigrant literature is always expected to be this rags to riches, hard work story.
And half of that is obviously our consuming behaviors, the things we choose to label as capital L literature, but any kind of immigrant narrative, it’s always participating in some modeling, it’s always pedagogical in some way.
And that’s what for me makes it a little more scary, it’s pedagogical in nature, you’re not just teaching little brown students how they should be behaving but you’re also teaching a wider readership what they should expect from those little brown students, and that to me is very dangerous…and that shouldn’t invalidate what these authors were originally trying to do, just tell a story, I think that’s fine, but nothing is just that simple.
How has your recent parenthood changed your work?
I haven’t worked! I don’t! But that’s not true. Before Zava was born I was starting work on [a new] book, through my research on casta paintings, paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries that depicted different degrees of whiteness, indigeneity, and blackness. They were anonymous paintings, totally scientific but they were also very baroque. They’re fascinating paintings and I was really thinking about having a biracial child and so I was working on it, and then—I can’t work on it now, I have to be really present now …
I’m making the decision to be present and my relationship to being present is now really unconditional, you’re just there, until you don’t have to be—they go to sleep or school or someone else takes over. And I don’t think I’d fully thought about my engagement with language—I always thought my relationship to language was unconditional in that way, but I didn’t know what unconditional really meant. So I guess it’s changed my work in that I’m having this period where I’m having to really love in a way that I haven’t before.
So, you know, I can’t work now, but hopefully I will again. I don’t mind. Part of what was worrying me was this sense of timeline. Like, who cares? Who cares if I don’t work on it right now? There’s not like a poetry czar that will walk around–
Saying, ‘you are no longer a poet!’
Right, if it’s not two years between or whatever… I think that’s especially valuable right now where so much about poetry has become professionalized by jobs and by the insecurity of labor and debt so, we’ll see what happens.
I’m curious about your use of sources. You have, in addition to the newspaper clippings and other texts, some fingerprints that emerged from some performance and body-art work you were doing.
There’s also a lot of tapes. I made a lot of tapes, with my parents. When I was living in LA, they’d come visit me, or I’d go visit them, and I’d always leave those little tiny tapes for those voice recorders.
So their project was, I asked them on their drives up if they could take the recorder and talk to it, and tell it stories about the times I wasn’t there yet, and the stories would revolve around the moment of them having to leave El Salvador and migrate to the US so they became about this diaspora.
Even before I got to San Diego, I had already lived…you know, after El Salvador we lived in Arizona, then we lived in Utah, then we lived in San Diego, so I always even felt that my being an immigrant wasn’t being as binary as, ‘first I was in this one locale, and then this other locale.’
Even the stories my parents would tell me, they were thoughtful enough to include the stories of migration that took place in Central America, how did we get there, how did my parents both get to the capital (in the sense that my dad’s family was from a different part of El Salvador and so was my mother’s), and when we’d go visit, we’d go and see these different towns, so I always had a very non-binary understanding of what the border was to begin with. I think being Central American and not Mexican, I’d always kind of laugh at border rhetoric that was very US/Mexico because there’s so many other communities that live at the border.
My neighbors were Filipino, the house next to us was rented out by people from the Navy, and they’d just cycle through people, whenever they were off ship, they’d use the house and leave, and there were a lot of Samoans, I had a lot of black friends, and there are white people that live at the border too—they all speak Spanish, so you know, nothing was ever as binary for me as what was made out, publicly… Being attentive to the dynamics of place has always been really beneficial for me just in terms of being a person, and not being locked into a way of thought that is not productive, for citizenship.
While reading your book, I noticed you were looking at newspaper clippings from the late 1990s until 2002.
My focus on those periods had to do with a lot of policy in California. You know California has that referendum that voting thing, so if enough people come together with enough money, they can put anything on the ballot.
So there was a period between 1998-2002 when a lot of really critical legislation was presented in California. It’s really during this period you began to see the way bodies are criminalized, so I wanted to focus on those clippings because of the way that sense of fear, that sense of protectionism, of law and order for some, really pervaded. So I really wanted to focus on those clippings during those years, because the policies were really frightening.
If you look at it now, in our national context, California is trying to right some wrongs, in some ways, so you can see how the same structure, referendum voting, is working in the favor of reason, but at that period—it was just all fear and all xenophobia.
When you think about national policy, do you feel any déjà vu now, or is it a different thing, what’s happening now?
It’s the exact same, static hum of fucking racism. It’s the same thing, it’s the same thing from 1866, it’s the same.
In your book, you talk about how colonization, history from 500 years, now becomes a method for today. There’s a sense of historical compression throughout your book, which is one of the things I like so much about it.
I’ve been wondering about this, as a teacher: is it really truly amnesia? (Which you can’t fault.) Or does that kind of ahistorical mentality hide behind our inherent kindness, so we think it’s amnesia and it’s really just negligence?
Because you wonder about the things that are passed down. I’m thinking here specifically of my students and their generation, and generations don’t exist in vacuums, they’re constantly relating to one another. If one generation can teach another generation to be homophobic, then they can obviously teach them other things. So I don’t think it is amnesia that permits this. And there was a line in the book, while I was writing it, that I did focus on amnesia, but I don’t think that’s true.
I think it’s outright negligence, an intentional reshaping. And this to me is why meaning is so important, because if you teach students how to create meaning, when they do something passive like read (because this is how they’ve been taught to do it, this is their methodology, that they receive meaning when they read, but don’t create it) if you can encourage them to understand that you create meaning when you read because of how you read, than that intervenes in that negligence.
The cool thing about also being an academic and having to write scholarship is I’m really kind of exploring these two poles of pessimism and possibility and I think there was a period, it might have been around when I got to SUNY Buffalo in 2006 when it was really popular to write these essays where you’re talking about possibility, and you’re looking to all this theory and stuff, but it’s not grounded in anything, but now it actually is [grounded] because it’s very scary to say “possibility” now because it’s very obvious that maybe there isn’t one.
So I think it’s really important now to think about possibility, and especially as different communities are facing fascism from different angles, we’re also starting to see, or I think feel possibility as solidarity. I think solidarity is one of the things that’s been missing for a long time, the absence of unions, you know, have made it easier for that to go away, but it’s also created again new possibilities for different sites of solidarity… I think that’s really exciting.
I’ve been trying to write about that, because [solidarity] does then begin to entangle itself with ways that we think about things like ‘the democratic’ or ‘the public,’ all things which are very important to poetry, especially American poetry, which has always been with its eye to those spaces, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and there’s a lot of books out there now that are also, looking directly into that mess. I think Rob Halpern does that really well in Common Places and Rankine’s Citizen is doing this, Look by Solmaz Sharif. So I think it’s a great time to be a poet.
Emily Anderson’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications including Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Conjunctions. Her book, Little:Novels (Blaze VOX Books 2015), erases each of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” novels. Emily holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from Bucknell University. She recently received her doctorate in English from the University at Buffalo.
W-Eau Claire > Faculty and Staff Profiles > Alvergue, Jose F.
Jose Alvergue
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
English
Phone: 715-836-2032
Email: alvergjf@uwec.edu
Precisely Ambiguous
the poetic metamorphosis of a U.S.-Mexico border story
Wednesday Apr. 19th, 2017
Hannah Mumm, photos by Andrea Paulseth
IT’S A THIN LINE. José Felipe Alvergue’s new book of poetry and visual art – precis – challenges the way we see the borders between countries.
The U.S.-Mexico border. An imagined line far from the mind and consciousness of the Chippewa Valley. The towns that surround it are transactional, commercial meccas exchanging anonymous bodies. The border is seen as transitive, never static; a pause in the migratory journey, never a home. Yet, for millions of border town residents, it is home. It is where their grandparents grew up, where they work and buy groceries, where their children go to school. To define the border so narrowly is dangerously reductionist, condensing individual cultures and persons into an indistinguishable conglomerate.
José Felipe Alvergue’s new book, precis, challenges pedestrian border narratives, exposing their myopic erasure of identity in a mélange of poetry, newspaper clippings, and visual art.
“The border is diverse beyond the popular concept of it,” says Alvergue, a professor of transnational literature at UW-Eau Claire. “It was important to perform a heterogeneity. Not all border narratives are about immigrants.”
“The border is diverse beyond the popular concept of it. It was important to perform a heterogeneity. Not all border narratives are about immigrants.” – Jose Alvergue, on the themes is new poetry book, precis
Indeed, precis is not about an immigrant, but rather a San Diego student. Set in the fictional border town of Sidro, California, the book meditates on her death by drunk driver while crossing the street. Found guilty of jaywalking, the lifeless victim was criminalized and the inebriated criminal redeemed. The woman was a real piece of Alvergue’s past, discovered in a terse article from a local newspaper and later identified as his student’s best friend.
Jarred by the cavalier maltreatment of her death and many others by the press, he sought to refute the common narratives of criminality and precarity that demonize border town citizens. In precis the tragedy is employed as a conduit to address systematic injustices.
Language and form are carefully combined to depict her story from every possible angle. The book performs an exploratory autopsy, Alvergue says. It reveals the details of her death and its impact piece by piece – in broken lyrics, extratextual newspaper excerpts, footnotes, and an epilogue essay. His varied approach turns the task of making meaning over to the reader, who must fit individual fragments and symbols into an interpretive whole.
“precis orients the audience towards a different mode of self-awareness through form – a reflection of how we read as well as the experience of reading itself,” Alvergue notes.
Multiplicity resides within the seemingly simple one-word title, at once implying a critique of the literary precis and precarity, a question, a prayer. Impressionistic maps of fingerprints, arrows, and lines scatter the pages, always without a key. Readers may follow, but they will never reach a destination. These comprehensive roadblocks are intentional, intended to translate the limits of border town life from experience to language and unite the conceptual and experiential on the page.
For readers in the Chippewa Valley, the book performs an essential task. The narrative doesn’t simply inform of distant tragedy, but also exposes broader issues rooted in hometown soil. The face of Eau Claire is largely monoracial and Midwestern, but its body is far more complex. Despite a growing multicultural population, the presence of persons of color is muted in institutions and civic spaces.
“In the absence of nonfictive portrayals, I think people can be easily seduced by essentialist narratives,” Alvergue says. “So, a book about transgressive, transnational experiences is doubly important.”
Alvergue will read from and sign copies of precis at 7pm Friday, May 19, at The Local Store, 205 N. Dewey St., Eau Claire.
Precis
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Precis
Jose Felipe Alvergue. Omnidawn, $17.95
trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-63243-030-4
Alvergue (gist: rift: drift: bloom) collages an enigmatic assemblage of sociopolitical theory, imagery, newspaper clippings, and rhetoric play in his second collection, echoing the ambiguity of the "border" that the book scrutinizes. The literal border lies between the U.S. and Mexico, but the book expands into a philosophical analysis of the boundaries between identities, bodies, and communities. "Root a line a poem compare Sidro/ finger tracing some thing imagined it happens outside/ folds," Alvergue writes in fractured phrases, attempting to linguistically capture liminal existence. The book's inspiration and intermittent narrative is rooted in San Diego's Sidro neighborhood, where some years before a drunk driver killed a supposed immigrant named Alma Gonzalez. In a theory-heavy epilogue, Alvergue reveals how this event, this newspaper blip, affected him--lingering emotions captured in such lines as "forget// America the lullabies/ the broken strain of memory// with songs of stolen & captive people." Readers may try to follow Alvergue's philosophical journey, but the structure, with random overlaid quotations and blacked out boxes of texts, imitates and invokes interior confusion. Though the work clearly holds deep considerations of modern human questions, Alvergue's uncertainty translates too perfectly onto the page; into a book of bewilderment that resists understanding. (Apr)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Precis." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928096&it=r&asid=e4e108ff33f85d1048557acb47a98fa9. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928096
Exploring Boundaries And Identities In José Alvergue's New Book Precis
BJ Hollars
April 18, 2017
by Jeana Conder
José Alvergue was born in San Salvador, El Salvador and was raised on the U.S./Mexico border. He is a graduate of Buffalo Poetics and CalArts Writing programs. José has written other works such as gist : rift : drift : bloom. José currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire.
His latest work precis, released on April 1, tells the tale of a girl that was killed by a drunk driver in San Diego’s Sidro neighborhood. José takes the reader on a journey between the literal U.S. and Mexico border and the border between individuals, bodies, and communities. Below is a brief interview with José on the content of his new book and the thought behind the format.
CVWG: PRECIS, BY SIMPLE DEFINITION MEANS A CONCISE SUMMARY OF ESSENTIAL POINTS, STATEMENTS, OR FACTS. HOW DO YOU FEEL THE TITLE OF YOUR BOOK REVEALS ITSELF WITHIN YOUR WORK AND IMPACTS THE MEANING?
Alvergue: The definition of the word was really important for me when thinking about the composition of the book. It’s an indication of knowledge, or knowing when it comes to people, place, and history. But it’s also an indication of genre in the sense that genre choreographs certain cultural expectations, values, and reveal reading practices: for example, the ways a cultural belief around “criminality” or “precarity” forms reading practices related to “border literature” or “immigrant literature.” I want to disrupt the continuity of these expectations with the story/-ies in the book. In many ways this is very similar to the Russian avant garde practice of factography from the 1920s, but it is also influenced by current day postlyric practices that treat language between its concreteness, and its social identity. You can’t summarize the assembly of the social, even if concreteness wants to show ‘the social’ as a static body––this gets even more entangled the more specific we are about the particular assembly in question. In this case, borders. There’s a review of the book I read recently and it sort of frustrated me because it assumed the names in the book are of immigrants, all of them. But this is not the case. There are Americans that live at the border too, yet the narratives concretized around border experiences are of immigrant contexts, which, as an expectation, not only reduces the heterogeneity of lives, but also essentializes one immigrant experience as a summary the many. So I include various instruments of summary: maps, etymological definitions, linguistics, industrial organization flow charts, finger tips, and ‘story’, both invented and non-fiction, but do not allow the gratification of the summary to complete expectation.
FROM THE EXCERPT I READ ON THE OMNIDAWN WEBSITE, PRECIS SEEMS TO BE DIFFERENT THAN YOUR AVERAGE NOVEL. PRECIS PLAYS WITH STRUCTURE, CREATING DIFFERENT EMOTIONS. FROM NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS, BLACKED OUT TEXT, AND MORE, HOW DO YOU HOPE THE READER WILL RECEIVE YOUR MESSAGE FROM SUCH A UNIQUE FORMAT?
The first thing I guess is that I don’t imagine it as a novel. There’s a really great description of one of my favorite books, Theresa Cha’s Dictée, by a prominent scholar, who calls the book a recit. I really like this way of talking about books that are conscious of genre only if for the intent of unsettling genre as boundary––or I guess treating genre exactly as that, boundaries that can be approached without destroying what makes them such––a boundary. Like walking along that dynamic terrain where a body of water territorializes and recedes from a terrain. It gets cloudy and one leaves an imprint, but the wash always resets the boundary. That’s the beauty of genre. You can’t break them. I would hope that potential readers understand that. Experimental or conceptual work won’t undo identity, particularly a reader’s identity; they seek to expand the topology or landscape we envision ourselves to inhabit. Poetry is about nuance, not reduction. I think these existential questions related to Literature must also account for area literature, like US Ethnic literature; it’s not just for the big white authors of ‘Western Civilization’. I would hope that they understand the politics of this intervention as well.
PRECIS FOCUSES ON THE LITERAL BORDER BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO, BUT ALSO FOCUSES ON THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES. DO YOU THINK ONE HAS TO UNDERSTAND THE BROADER ASPECTS OF DIVIDES TO TRULY UNDERSTAND THE IMPACTS OF THE BORDER BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES?
I don’t know if one needs to understand “divides” but rather be comfortable with the prospect of caesuras that are unbreachable. We can exist within difference without imposing homogeneity. The existentialism of this is important when it comes to considering legislation, because the ‘planning’ or the beliefs undergirding the support for political institutionalisms feeds into the feedback loop, which we experience as phobias. I think these fears, homophobia, xenophobia, and more specifically Islamophobia, are partially existential––a deep fear that the mere acknowledgement or presence of a person that exists in a state of difference to the normative will unrattle the veneer behind which Americaneity often resides. We all experience “divides,” but we also can’t level them as being the same. What we should be thinking about is the way a constructed fear is appropriated as a personal way of being American.
YOU START OFF YOUR SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK BY DESCRIBING THE BORDER AS "A POLICED REALM, NEOLIBERAL MARKET." WITH THE NEWLY FOUNDED REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED GOVERNMENT, DO YOU HOPE PRECIS CAN MAKE A POLITICAL STAND AGAINST THE ERASURE OF IDENTITY OF THOSE EFFECTED BY THE BORDER?
The stand can never be structural to the degree necessary for actual protection against the policies that will prey and are currently preying on the already precarious. The project of conceptual poetry is one of meaning; it’s meant to encourage an enchantment with language in a manner that invites the invention of meaning on behalf of another, another who is not the writer or the lyric persona of the text: in other words, the reader. We often don’t realize that we place meaning back in the world with the ways we interact with representation. It’s not about purely binary, good/bad, do something/don’t do something responses. It’s about nuance. I think the stand against erasure begins with a recognition––as a self-care––of our own capacity to involve ourselves in the making of meaning.
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