Contemporary Authors

The Lust of Unsentimental Waters

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Rosa Alcalá's poems dwell in the liminal space between the personal and the political—poems built on the idea that 'the world exists,' and that work to define the metaphysical and ephemeral architectures of origin, migration, nationalism, and loss. Rosa Alcalá is uncompromising, wry, and brutal: all of the qualities that significant poetic works of cultural criticism require."—Carmen Giménez Smith

"'I want to know how everything changes with the price of admission,' writes Rosa Alcalá in her extraordinary new book. These poems begin at the exact point where 'the fundamental concepts of elementary navigation / become unhinged,' as they invent a new way of talking: developing tenuous and affectionate convergences between desire and fear, love and anger—even sex, money, tradition, and the history of appearances. It's all here. What fascinates Alcalá is precisely what animates her poetry: 'the mess of lost power,' compelled at once by contradiction and complicity, yet cleaving with an unsentimental eye and an inspiring wit."—Joshua Marie Wilkinson

MyOther Tongue

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Women's Studies. "How do we trace shifts of home or syllable, the history of becoming in language? We show what's passed on with the mother-milk, the blood-words, pushed from the body onto the page. That's what these poems do, spilling beautifully, forming in the mouth of the reader. This is the 'ark built to survive': our things built with words circling, mother-to-daughter-to- mother-to-daughter." — Eleni Sikelianos

"Here are poems that reckon with the histories of family, generations, language and love: how our tongues are mothered or not, how we are given to and abandoned. Alcalá writes, 'What good is it to erect/ of absence/ a word?' Tough and gorgeous, smart and touching, these poems are offerings that tie, untie, unite, entice." — Hoa Nguyen

"Rosa Alcalá's new poemario MYOTHER TONGUE begins in the archives of what has yet to be written. She writes with precision and dynamism from the borders between death (of a mother) and birth (of a daughter). What a body produces, and what produces a body: labor, trauma, memory, sacrifice, pain, danger, and language formed both on the tongue and in the culture and the spaces between what can be said and what is missing, the linguistic and existential problem of not having the right words. The darknesses in Alcalá's work emerge from what happens when we don't see ourselves in the languages that both form and destroy us as we labor in this 'dream called money.' Alcalá is a {un}documentarian of the highest order, a {un}documentarian of what history and memory try to erase. Her poems are urgent, demanding and haunting." — Daniel Borzutzky

Rosa Alcalá is the author of two books of poetry, Undocumentaries (2010) and The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (2012), both from Shearsman Books. Her poems are also included in two recent anthologies: Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath, 2014) and The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books, 2015). Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), edited and translated by Alcalá, was runner-up for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Rosa Alcalá is the author of two full-length collections, THE LUST OF UNSENTIMENTAL WATERS (Shearsman Books, 2012) and UNDOCUMENTARIES (Shearsman Books, 2010), and two chapbooks, Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna*, 2003) and Undocumentary (Dos Press, 2008). Her work appears in the anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007), and in journals such as Mandorla, CHAIN, Barrow Street, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Brooklyn Rail. Alcalá has also translated poetry by Cecilia Vicuña, Lourdes Vázquez, and Lila Zemborain, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, she currently resides in El Paso, Texas, where she teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Thursday, November 3, 2011
Rosa Alcalá: an interview, a review

As we approach the first installment of Latino/a Poetry Now, Letras Latinas Blog would like offer an exclusive interview with one of the readers slated to take the stage at Harvard next Tuesday, Rosa Alcalá. Eduardo C. Corral and Aracelis Girmay, who will be joining Rosa, were the subjects of previous recent posts by Lauro Vazquez.  We offer, as well, a review of Undocumentaries.

***

An interview with Rosa Alcalá

conducted by Carmen Giménez Smith

Carmen Giménez Smith: The title of your book evokes lots of different concepts: the documentary, the undocumented worker, the notion of archive. How do you see the title speaking to the greater themes of the book?

Rosa Alcalá: When I started this book, I wanted to write about factory work because suddenly, as a first-year tenure track assistant professor, I knew no one who worked in a factory, even though almost ever adult I knew growing up, including my parents, were factory workers. My father worked in a dye house, my mother in a number of small assembly-line jobs. I lived surrounded by factories.  But I wasn't sure where to begin, so I thought maybe I could widen my scope by plugging into the history of factory work through critical and historical studies and through documentaries.  It became interesting to me at some point in the process the ways in which I was trying to legitimize my experience by watching documentaries or reading scholarly articles, but when I wrote, the personal became superimposed like a double image on those archives and studies. I also started to think about the difference between documentary films/historiography and the lyric poem, how one comes to represent the archive and how the other gathers what is left on the cutting room floor. I wanted the book to in some ways bring together both of those impulses: the need to document by piecing together what is "verifiable," and the equally messy work of placing in conversation with those gaps, erasures, and fragments that accompany experience and memory.<< I wanted the historical and the personal to be loops of different films that run concurrently. >>

The book, in large part, because it proceeds from this shift in class status, attempts to explore identity as something in flux.  Identity, too, then, is the "undocumentary" of the book, the thing that isn't easily verifiable, although we always come up with neat checklists and tests of origin, authenticity. This has come up recently with the cast of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore. There seems to be controversy over the "fact" that Snookie was born in Chile, even though her adoptive parents are of Italian descent. Another cast member is supposedly half Spanish and Irish, (just like Rita Hayworth, by the way, whose given name is Margarita Cansino). The internet is blowing up over this--comments from readers defending both sides: like, so what if she's Chilean, she can choose who she wants to be; or, why can't she be proud of who she really is instead of trying to be Italian. Another person on the Internet saying, well, didn't Italians immigrate to Chile, maybe she really is Italian. The comments are fascinating in the ways they trace these complexities of identity, affiliation, migration, origin. Snookie's questioned identity seems to even have spurred some suspicion regarding the ethnic origins of other cast members: like maybe so and so's really Puerto Rican, etc. These comments--and perhaps the show itself--also reflect, for me, the ways we often demand and perform limited manifestations of identity.

CGS: Your poems often do something that we don't see in poetry very often-- they talk about labor and money. It seems subversive because culturally we don't feel very comfortable talking about money and it seems a particularly fraught subject to approach in poetry.

RA: Yes, I think class is largely not discussed in this country in relation to identity, so I thought a lot about <>. I also wanted to write about different jobs I've had. I think it's become a cliché for poets to put in their bios all the menial jobs they've had. I'm not sure if this is because poetry seems like non-work, or that poets want to seem relatable. Nevertheless, poetry is work, too, and that becomes one of the jobs of the book. The meta-job.

I also wanted to write from an historical moment in which  unionized factory jobs with decent hourly wages and health insurance, like the kind my dad had (but my mom didn't--there's the gender rub), are quickly disappearing. <> has changed dramatically because of this.

CGS: Can you talk about some of the poets or works of poetry (or fiction, nonfiction, etc.) that foreground the work you do in this book?

RA: With regards to questions of identity, Undocumentaries is indebted to Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation; it really for me is the book to go to when diving into the murky waters of American identity. Walter Mignolo's Local Histories/Global Designs and Derrida's Archive Fever also made an impact.  It is not by accident, either, that I was re-reading and writing on Williams's Paterson when I started the book. My book, too, begins in Paterson, NJ, my hometown. There are other influences, echoes, and inspirations: Mónica de la Torre's Talk Shows, César Vallejo's Paris poems, Roberto Tejada's Mirrors for Gold. There are those who've helped me think about labor, class, and gender issues: Susan Briante, Rodrigo Toscano, you, Maria Melendez, Claudia Rankine, Brenda Coultas, Hoa Nguyen. All these poets/theorists have helped me think through issues of bilingualism and ethnicity and nationalism. All of them have taught me the possibilities of poetic form.

CGS: In "Confessional Poem," you write, "The girl next door had something to teach me/about what to air." I am really intrigued by the way you navigate biography, how you air your business. I feel that I come to know your biography through a deep examination of your interior life.
How did you negotiate what you wanted to air?

RA: That poem was in part a response to something I read in which a clothesline is meant to reveal a lot about a woman's intimacies, whether she has an active sex life or not. You know: big bloomers=no nookie. And I thought that isn't quite right.  The clothesline--like the poetry line--isn't exactly a confession.  I mean, this is old news, I know, but what I wanted to explore are the different elements that tension the line the female speaker/poet is hanging her clothes on-- those institutional, aesthetic, and social norms/expectations/prejudices, those private and public authority figures that she pushes and pulls against.  Ultimately, she gets to control the pulley in the poem, but there's been quite a bit of intervention on the part of many different forces, including herself.  And I also just love the image of a clothesline uniting two houses, an ever-changing installation. It's really about those tensions between the public and private that interest me, as well the ways in which the clothesline speaks class.  This is probably changing because everyone's trying to be more green, but there are ordinances in certain neighborhoods that prohibit the use of clotheslines because they're considered ugly.  People want their neighbor's lawn to be without weeds, their view without underwear, etc. <>, I think,<< is very codified by gender, class, etc.>>, so I think my poems work within and against those codes, too.  The poem is also about the ways in which we view acceptable content in lyric poetry within the contemporary context--how much has changed and how much has not.  I mean, as far as the poem being confessional or not: it does have some elements that are autobiographical, except I'm not going to tell you in this interview which ones.

***

Undocumentaries. 
Exeter (U.K.): Shearsman, 2010. 85 pp. $15.00

by Joyelle McSweeney

The provocative title of Rosa Alcalá’s Undocumentaries presents two buoyant challenges in one. First, it rejects the category of ‘documentary poetics’ normally associated with Marxist didacticism, transparency, and solidarity with the working classes (a poem that ‘documents’ the facts of the struggle). At the same time, it suggests that the poems gathered in this volume, in rejecting such tenets, will therefore be illegal—undocumented—crossing borders and carrying all the associations of resourcefulness, invention and criminality carried in that term.

This macrocosmic rejection of genre and dedication to boundary-crossing illicitness is reflected in within the syntax and motifs of the poems themselves. Just as the volume itself rejects the ‘real thing’ documentary poetics purports to capture, so Alcalá’s opening poem, “Undocumentary”, opens up an aperture between the speaker and ‘a girl like me’, the latter being an avatar who will move through the Artificial spaces of these poems: “A girl like me falls in love/with Yeats/and never recovers/from the stretch/of recognition//more twistable now in pArts[.]” Identification with Art and Artifice opens up an alternative space in the world, but still in proximity to it, an Artifice stretching away from what is normally located in the ‘real’.  Yeats himself moved into those spaces, his gyres, his Byzantiums, his fairy Ireland. The distance (that is, the difference) between “me” and “A girl like me” also opens up alternative “twistable” conceptual space. But Alcalá’s speaker is not a disciple  of Yeats, Art, or anything else; her role is to continue Art’s twisting motion by twisting Art; thus Yeats’s circus animals are reworked as balloon animals, “animal shapes/ballooning into pity/or pride.” Art’s grandeur, that is, its possibility, is the same as its gratuitousness, its twisting, pArty-favor, shrinking and swelling, plastic animal shapes.

If Alcalá is not invested in Art’s responsibility to report the facts, she’s not interested in escaping into realms of poesie pure, however delightful. One poem asks, “Should I construct him a paper/lantern, a luminous fiction that is—if not/a recollection—at least a festive/froth?”. As the line breaks and generous motion of this quote suggests, Alcalá’s poems do not settle at one or another extreme of Art but (nomadically?) move and double back, continually twisting the skein and the plane of Art, closer and further away to what looks (duplicitously enough) like reality.  “Minnesota men slice/at the chests of pigs/making musicals/with their wrists,” her speaker reports; here, the wrists of the butchers themselves are tracked by the speaker’s eye and serve as a kind of metonym for its motion, moving between the meaty thinginess of the chests of pigs and Art, “ musicals.” Meanwhile an endnote tells us this apparently documentary image of meatpackers at work is actually referencing a (filmic) documentary, Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, while other pArts of the poem “attempt to recreate lost footage of dye house workers in New Jersey.” This poem, then, tracks the flexing fortunes of Art as it accrues and is erased from the world, while also pondering on the way Art can and cannot carry the freight of content: “who is/the scab of me/when no meatpacking walkout/can suffice?”

Alcalá’s<>, exploiting the line break to flex a pun or move backwards and forwards in syntax in order to bring a truism up short or smuggle in a surprise exit line that shocks the poem like a depth charge: “You want tradition? Here’s the mortar & pestle./Believe me, the point’s just to pulverize.” Other times she strings an agile image from line to line. In “Confessional Poem,”

The girl next door had something to teach me
about what to air:  On the line
somebody’s business gets told
then recounted; it’s best to thread a tale
for the neighbors, an orchestration
of sorts.  […]

Here, Alcalá’s habitual avatar, “the girl”, is shown as separated from the “me” that she is elsewhere “like”; here, she’s there, “next door”, just a breath away, but far enough to be scrutinized by the “me” and everyone else.  The successive lines inscribe and reinscribe the primary image of laundry stretched on a line, while that image goes beguilingly literal and figurative, 3-D and flat, concrete to airy, the tale that can be ‘threaded’ and that elapses into air, a reality that’s twice told, first “told/then recounted”, first a “tale” then an “orchestration.” As the poem concludes: “Of course, all of this is scanty truth. Who hangs anything out to dry/when invention has halved the work?” Moments like these, plentiful across Alcalá’s lyrics, are brainy and punning, looming large (that is, pertaining to genre and content) and small (that is, site-specific to the apArtment courtyard discussed in the poem) at once. They recall Harryette Mullen’s fine, ensnaring work with both idiom and truism and with the rhetorical question as a cantilevered way to change the dimension of the poem, break its textual plane and poke the reader in the chest.

But Alcalá’s best moments, I think, are in her prose work, which shed the visual rhetoric of the verse and (also like Mullen) <> in which words, by simply succeeding each other, create<< a surreal terrain in which one word, phrase, clause, or sentence can upend the last, rendering figurative what had been literal>>, altering the scale or otherwise switching registers between one footfall and the next.  In “Allegory of a Girl with Aspirations,”

I feel the fossil of some baron’s mutton haunches in the claw-foot tub, and think of my cook. I want to carry myself across the threshold, to kiss him, to be him, to sharpen his knives, to wear his jacket, to button it up the left side, then the right, masking and unmasking a spill, a breast, a blunder, a chest. Feigning a work of Art I enter, camera attached to an eye. Everything is perfectly framed in the viewfinder as it spans the room. I take note: from the outside, the inside becomes another angle; from the inside, the picture changes with each step.

In this passage, the short successive phrases in the second sentence tackles the figure of the cook one short tactile unit at a time, so that the reader cannot get a sightline on the whole beyond the speaker’s breathless fantasy, which dissects or literally slices up its knife-bearing object. The instrument of fantasy is Art; “Feigning a work of Art I enter,” but it is not just the subject of Art that is altered by Art’s presence but the “I” as well, appositively rendered “camera attached to an eye.” Made Artificial, the speaker can move inside the Artificial space of fantasy, but no overview or map is available; “from the inside, the picture changes with each step.” Phrase by phrase the reader is as disoriented and enthralled as the speaker. “There is no way to piece it together. He shows me all the surfaces, but I can’t locate a burner, an oven.” Finally, and completely unexpectedly, the poem converts in a stutter and an error (“I sink. I sing:”) to the piercing sweetness and the throw-away perspicacity of a fool’s song or ditty, centered on the page (thematically and visually recalling Bishop’s italicized conclusion to “The Armadillo”: too pretty, dreamlike mimicry, etc):

The compote or the composed.
The cook or the dandy.
Who will glaze my ham?
Who will I marry?

The quandrying of this verse suspends the speaker in the shocked, voltaic space between would-be separate poles—life and Art, “The cook or the dandy”. And yet it is a suspended space that can only be entered by the commitment to the dandy, to Art itself. Indeed, Alcalá’s speaker becomes a dandy, slicing up the cook’s exterior and donning it like an outfit. It is only by approaching or moving into Art that she can confect this ultravivid, intensified version of “the cook”, reality.  Perhaps in her next book she will marry it, marry it, marry it.

20th Century Poetry in English and Spanish, Translation

 Rosa Alcalá received her MFA from Brown University and her Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 2003, Some Maritime Disasters This Century was published as a limited edition by Belladonna/Boog Books (New York). Undocumentaries, a selection of poems, is forthcoming from Dos Press. Her poems have also appeared in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, edited by Francisco Aragón (U of AZ Press, 2007), and Cinturones de óxido: de Buffalo con amor / Rust Belt Encounters: From Buffalo with Love, translated by Ernesto Livón-Grosman and Omar Pérez (Torre de Letras, La Habana, Cuba, 2005). Alcalá has translated Cecilia Vicuña’s El Templo (Situations Press, 2001 ) and Cloud-net (Art in General, 1999). Her translation of Vicuña’s essay-poem, “Ubixic del Decir, ‘Its Being Said’: A Reading of a Reading of the Popol Vuh,” was published in With Their Hands and Their Eyes: Maya Textiles, Mirrors of a Worldview, Etnografish Museum (Belgium, 2003). Alcalá’s translation of Bestiary: The Selected Poems of Lourdes Vázquez was published by Bilingual Press in 2004. Forthcoming is a co-translation (with Mónica de la Torre) of Lila Zemborain's Malvas Orquídeas del Mar/ Mauve Sea Orchids (Belladonna). She has also translated poems for the forthcoming Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Her poems, translations, and reviews have been published widely in a variety of literary journals, including the Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, tripwire, Kenyon Review, and Mandorla. She has held artist residencies and has given talks and readings in the U.S., Spain, Cuba, and Scotland.

Rosa Alcalá obtuvo su MFA de Brown University y su doctorado en Inglés de State University of New York at Buffalo. En 2003, Belladonna/Boog Books (New York) publicó su poemario Some Maritime Disasters This Century como edición limitada. Undocumentaries, una selección de poemas, será publicada por la editorial Dos Press. Sus poemas han aparecido en The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, editado por Francisco Aragón (Editorial de la Universidad de Arizona, 2007), y Cinturones de óxido: de Buffalo con amor / Rust Belt Encounters: From Buffalo with Love, traducido por Ernesto Livón-Grosman y Omar Pérez (Torre de Letras, La Habana, Cuba, 2005).
Alcalá ha traducido El Templo (Situations Press, 2001) y Cloud-net (Art in General, 1999), dos trabajos de Cecilia Vicuña. Su traducción del ensayo-poema de Vicuña, “Ubixic del Decir, ‘Its Being Said’: A Reading of a Reading of the Popol Vuh”, fue incluído en With Their Hands and Their Eyes: Maya Textiles, Mirrors of a Worldview (Etnografish Museum, Bélgica, 2003). Su traducción de Bestiary: The Selected Poems of Lourdes Vázquez fue publicada por el Bilingual Press en el 2004. La co-traducción (junto con Mónica de la Torre) de Malvas Orquídeas del Mar/ Mauve Sea Orchids, trabajo de Lila Zemborain, está a punto de ser publicada por la editorial Belladona. Asimismo, tradujo poemas para la venidera Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Sus poemas, traducciones y reseñas han sido publicados en varias revistas literarias, como Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, tripwire, Kenyon Review y Mandorla. Alcalá ha obtenido varias becas artísticas y ha presentado ponencias, lecturas y charlas sobre poesía en los Estados Unidos, España, Cuba, y Escocia.

Rosa Alcalá is the author of two chapbooks, Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna, 2003) and Undocumentary (Dos Press, 2008). Her work appears in the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007), and in journals such as Mandorla, Chain, Barrow Street, Tarpaulin Sky,and The Brooklyn Rail. Alcalá has also translated poetry by Cecilia Vicuña, Lourdes Vázquez, and Lila Zemborain, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, she currently resides in El Paso, Texas, where she teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Rosa Alcalá is the author of a poetry collection Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010) and two chapbooks:  Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna, 2003) and  Undocumentary (Dos Press, 2008). Alcalá has also translated poetry by Cecilia Vicuña, Lourdes Vázquez, and Lila Zemborain, among others. Recent translations include Zemborain's  Guardians of the Secret (Noemi Press, 2009), and poems for  The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009).

She teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

March 23, 2015
REVIEW: Undocumentaries by Rosa Alcalá

by Jose Angel Araguz
…what I write isn’t memoir or autobiography; it’s <>—call it lyric, experimental, what have you—but I’m not ashamed to say that I “draw” (I’m thinking of both a graphic mark and a blood-draw) <>, that identity is central to my work
(Alcala, PSA)*
…a graphic mark and a blood-draw –
Within the idea of the artist’s mark, there is the implication of creation, of continuing to work at something fresh. The graphic mark also carries ideas of control and exploration. The blood-draw, on the other hand, brings in a world of double meaning. Because it is blood, it is intimate, it is physical and fluid and life. Blood is also family, where one comes from. Yet, the blood-draw also brings to mind the hospital. The blood-draw within this context is also life: blood is drawn for the sake of others, in this case not family in the strict sense, but the family of blood types, the tribes of positive and negative and neutral. Between these two ideas of drawing, the world of Undocumentaries can be said to unfold.
In the poem “In the Waiting Room,” for example, the reader follows the meditation of the speaker as she, “sit[s] for hours looking at open-mouthed babies” (Alcala 75). The meditation moves from the immediate scene to the political implications, both of being a young woman having to “submit/to the whole silly production” as well as the knowledge that:
…within
the cluster of beings the technician
examines for future antagonisms
against the state, it will never find one
worthy of being knighted, no perfect
English gentleman.
The poem takes on another layer at this point, moves from ideas of womanhood to ideas of race. The tension in these ideas lies in both the lightheartedly cynical phrasing of “silly production” on one end, and the calling of the doctor as “technician” and children as “future antagonisms.” These choices in diction set up a speaker able to make the distance of language allow for an intimacy in feeling. The poem continues:
English gentleman. This my mother knew
despite all the fanfare about Charles and Diana’s
wedding: princes and kings marry their own:
keep washing the dishes (except she said it
in Spanish).
The rumination on race becomes one on motherhood, specifically the speaker’s mother. Race remains prominent, however, in the content of what exactly her mother “knew.” Her mother knew of segregation as much as daydreaming: knew about class as much as glamor. Family here is presented as where one draws their knowledge of the world from.
Furthermore, family becomes what is learned as well as relearned:
…As early as possible,
we learn to flirt with the guy who sells or makes
bed springs, those things beneath us
that cushion our sleep. Someone who never
discusses what he does, and works overtime
to bring the rest of his family
over.
The unspoken comes into play here in the potential “Someone who never/discusses what he does,” and echoes much of what the book is about: the “undocumentary” as <>.
This exploration of the tension between said/unsaid and shown/unshown is continued in “Confessional Poem,” where the image of a clothesline is taken on for its narrative potential. Alcala jumps right into the clothesline as metaphor for the poetic line with the first lines:
The girl next door had something to teach me
about what to air: On the line
somebody’s business gets told
then recounted; it’s best to thread a tale
for the neighbors, an orchestration
of sorts…
(21)
What is immediately striking about these lines is their confidence, their almost swagger, which
challenges the conventional notions of gossip the clothesline carries. These lines, in their tone and knowing, bring to mind the work of Sylvia Plath – a connection furthered by the choice of title “Confessional Poem.” At other points in the book, Alcala shows an awareness of writing within a poetic tradition (“A girl like me falls in love/with Yeats/and never recovers” from the poem “Undocumentary” is but one example), but nowhere else does the writing both indicate and challenge a specific tradition as it does here. The comparison to Plath is in terms of tone as well as the awareness each poet shows at working at a craft that is as much manipulation as a magic born of honesty.
…You wouldn’t know it
from the delicates I roll
into the yard. It’s all the same peek-a-boo lace
and stunted imagination. Of course,
all of this is scanty truth
Within the context of a poem called “Confessional Poem,” words like “delicates,” “peek-a-boo lace” and “scanty” are charged with multiple layers of meaning. One marvels at the wordplay at first for the skill on the poet’s part, and later for what it says of the speaker of these words, the self-deprecating air the words hang in. In drawing out the metaphor of the clothesline, Alcala presents a speaker aware of the insidious nature of narrative, how it has both <>. No story is the whole story. For a poem with the word “Confessional” in the title, very little is confessed. In fact, the idea that something personal can come through in a poem is challenged. Yet, in developing ideas of ways that narratives can be created and manipulated, the speaker of this poem gives an almost truer confession: the confession of a magician drawing back the curtain, the confession of a poet who knows how much control they have over language and how little control they have over life.
The poem’s final note drives this point home:
…Who hangs anything out to dry
when invention has halved the work?
This “halving” implies what is left unsaid in the act of documenting. <>
*(opening quote taken from “Latino/a Poetry Now: 3 Poets discuss their art (Rosa Alcala, Eduardo C. Corral, Aracelis Girmay).” Melendez, Maria. Poetry Society of America, n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2013).
Undocumentaries is available from Shearsman Books.
José Angel Araguz, author of the chapbook Corpus Christi Octaves, is a CantoMundo fellow. Winner of RHINO Poetry’s 2015 Editor’s Prize, he has had poems recently in Blue Mesa Review, Pilgrimage, and NANO Fiction as well as in the anthology Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance. He is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. He runs the poetry blog, The Friday Influence.