Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Cruel Futures
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 2/20/1971
WEBSITE: http://carmengimenezsmith.com
CITY: Las Cruces
STATE: NM
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Married to writer Evan Lavender-Smith.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| 100 | 1_ |a Giménez Smith, Carmen, |d 1971- |
| 400 | 1_ |a Smith, Carmen Giménez, |d 1971- |
| 670 | __ |a Odalisque in pieces, 2009: |b E-Cip t.p. (Carmen Giménez Smith) data view (Giménez Smith, Carmen; b. Feb. 20, 1971) |
| 670 | __ |a Cruel futures, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Carmen Giménez Smith) |
| 670 | __ |a Amazon website, viewed November 28, 2017: |b (Carmen Giménez Smith received a BA in English at San Jose State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds (2010) and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for Goodbye, Flicker (2012). She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (2014), an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and on the board of RASA, which sponsors the Thinking Its Presence conference on race and art. She serves as the publisher of Noemi Press. She is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech and the poetry editor for The Nation) |
| 953 | __ |a rg12 |b rg11 |
PERSONAL
Born February 20, 1971, in New York, NY; married Evan Lavender-Smith (a writer); children: two.
EDUCATION:San Jose State University, B.A., 1994; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1997.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Iowa, Iowa City, teaching/writing fellow, 1996-97; San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, lecturer, 1998-2000; University of California, Santa Cruz, creative writing instructor, 1999-2002; Harvey Milk Institute, San Francisco, CA, creative writing instructor, 2000; City College of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, instructor, 2000-02; New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, instructor, 2003-07, assistant professor, 2007- c. 2017; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, professor of English, c. 2017–. Ashland University Low-Residency M.F.A. Program, Ashland, OR, honored visiting graduate faculty, 2011–. Nation, poetry editor, 2017–. Noemi Press, publisher.
AWARDS:American Book Award, 2010, for Bring Down the Little Birds; Howard Foundation Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction, 2011–12; Juniper Prize for Poetry, 2012, for Goodbye, Flicker.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, Vol. 2, and periodicals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Baffler, and Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
Carmen Gimenez Smith is a prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, publisher, and teacher whose work is unabashedly feminist, also addressing racial and class issues especially as they concern Latinas; she is the daughter of South American immigrants. “I don’t understand why it’s okay to eschew feminism when at its core feminism’s basic tenet is that women deserve to be treated equally,” she told Critical Mass online interviewer Dianca London Potts. “To be opposed to what essentially amounts to a civil rights movement should embarrass people. For this reason, all of my work is feminist and my intention is to continue to find ways to deepen the feminism and social possibility in my work.” To another interviewer, Ivy Pochoda at the Superstition Review website, she said: “The battle [for gender equity] will never end. It is an ongoing battle. We’re not only fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for our mothers, and our grandmothers, and our daughters, and their daughters.”
Bring Down the Little Birds
In the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else, Gimenez Smith examines her life and that of her mother from this feminist perspective. The book chronicles the author’s pregnancy with her second child, which came at a time when her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and beginning to lose her memory. Gimenez Smith wonders how she will manage all the demands of mothering two children as well as working outside the home, and she speculates on how her mother cope. She imagines herself as a teenager discovering her mother’s wedding dress and a secret journal, from which she copies passages into a notebook that will be discovered by her son. “The book started as a lyric essay, my first real attempt, and I realized that I wanted to keep going with it, and I wanted to write about my mom and everything she was going through,” Gimenez Smith told Molly Gaudry at the Lit Pub website. “The book was very much written in the moment, so it was cathartic.”
The author’s unusual approach to memoir-writing impressed several reviewers. With the references to the imaginary journal of Gimenez Smith’s mother, “Bring Down the Little Birds reads like the notebook of a mother who snatches bits of time to jot down her thoughts,” related Literary Mama online contributor Marilyn Bousquin. “Yet make no mistake: this is a literary notebook crafted by a poet who delights in each turn of phrase.” In the web-based Contrary Magazine, Thomas Larson noted: “Unlike the falsifications of James Frey, this fictive/imagined voice has a purpose: to embody the stress of Giménez Smith’s expanding family through the conjuration of what her mother must have endured.” The memoir adds up to “a strangely eloquent and fragmented meditation on motherhood’s woe,” he concluded.
Milk & Filth
The poetry collection Milk & Filth deals with issues of race and gender, and also stands as a tribute to feminist artists who preceded Gimenez Smith. She writes about female bodily functions such as menstruation, childbirth, and lactation, making clear that they should not be considered taboo subjects. She also makes reference to a wide range of real and fictional female figures, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, William Shakespeare’s Juliet, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and comedian Joan Rivers. She expresses rage at the ways many societies have degraded women, and she seeks to elevate women’s status. “The rhetoric of social justice for feminism and for civil rights often evoke the very real struggles of its subjects, and rather than feel shame for wanting to enact what happens to my body and feel obliged to abstract it for aesthetic currency, I’d like to return to the very essential idea of body,”she told an interviewer at the Letras Latinas blog.
Some critics thought she had examined these issues with insight and appealing language. “The arsenal of poetic devices that Gimenez-Smith unleashes within the book includes a wit that is razor sharp while maintaining a sense of self-deprecation, lines that are syntactically complex and heightened by assonance and dissonance while an innate sense of music propels the reader down the page,” remarked Volta Blog reviewer Caitlin Ferguson. Gimenez Smith,” she said, “produces a feminist manifesto without losing the ability to remind the reader of our humanness.” Rigoberto Gonzalez, writing online at Critical Mass, praised “the intriguing complexity of Giménez Smith’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek commentary of femininity and even feminism,” adding that she brings “a fresh energy into the discourse of sex and sexuality.”
Cruel Futures
In Cruel Futures, Gimenez Smith again examines gender roles along with other social and political matters, and she looks at her own life, including her attitudes toward popular culture. “My petty Madame Bovarian despair is at the core of all my watching!” she writes. She brings the humor often associated with her work, writing of her children, “I didn’t make them organic or French yet / I think it’s too late but we’ll live.” She also expresses wonder at her children’s innocence and meditates on how her relationship with them will change as they grow up. “To them the imaginary is still marvel / though each minute inverts them away from me,” she relates. Other poems convey anger at the gendered expectations put on women. “I live on the corner of identity/ and shadow,” she observes, adding that breaking out of prescribed gender roles makes women seen as “monsters.”
Some reviewers considered the collection vintage Gimenez Smith, exploring her usual themes but with a perspective that has evolved and deepened over her career. “The maturity of her work shines through every word,” commented A.K. Afferez at the Winter Tangerine website, explaining: “Her capacity to weave together different narrative modes or voices is heightened.” Afferez called Cruel Futures “a collection of incredible humor, wry and witty,” and noted that many of the poems “perform a special kind of sleight-of-hand, misdirecting your attention so you are expecting one thing, and thus preparing you for the full force of the punch a few lines later.” A Publishers Weekly critic termed the collection’s contents “powerful,” as “Gimenez Smith’s crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy.” Afferez added: “I wouldn’t mind having these poems to accompany me through the apocalypse.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Gimenez Smith, Carmen, Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (memoir), University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), 2010.
PERIODICALS
American Poets, spring-summer, 2018, Major Jackson, review of Cruel Futures.
Library Journal, October 15, 2009, Karla Huston, review of Odalisque in Pieces, p. 81.
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of Cruel Futures, p. 50.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets website, https://www.poets.org (June 2, 2018), review of Cruel Futures; (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
Bennington College website, http://www.bennington.edu/ (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
Bombay Gin Literary Journal, https://bombayginjournal.com/ (December 5, 2013), Aurora Smith, review of The City She Was.
Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/ (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
Carmen Gimenez Smith website, https://www.carmengimenezsmith.com (June 27, 2018).
Coldfront, http://coldfrontmag.com/ (December 6, 2011), Krystal Languell, “Spotlight: Carmen Gimenez Smith.”
Collagist, http://thecollagist.com/ (December 15, 2010), Jena Salon, review of Bring Down the Little Birds.
Columbia Poetry Reviews blog, https://blogs.colum.edu/ (May 10, 2013), interview with Carmen Gimenez Smith.
Contrary Magazine, http://contrarymagazine.com (July 6, 2018), Thomas Larson, review of Bring Down the Little Birds.
Cosmonauts Avenue, http://cosmonautsavenue.com/ (June 27, 2018), “Tiny Spills: Carmen Giménez Smith.”
Critical Mass, http://bookcritics.org/ (May 31, 2012), Rigoberto Gonzalez, review of Goodbye, Flicker; (January 22, 2014), review of Milk & Filth; (February 21, 2014), “NBCC Poetry Finalist Carmen Giménez in Conversation with MFA Student Dianca London Potts.”
Internet Review of Books , http://internetreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/ (October 20, 2010), Gary Presley. review of Bring Down the Little Birds.
Jacket 2, https://jacket2.org (4/9/2016), David Colón , “A Fugue Reading by Rosa Alcalá, Carmen Giménez Smith, Roberto Tejada, and Rodrigo Toscano.”
La Bloga, https://labloga.blogspot.com (December 21, 2009), Daniel Olivas, interview with Carmen Giménez Smith.
Letras Latinas Blog, http://letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com/ (November 10, 2013), interview with Carmen Gimenez Smith.
Literary Mama, http://www.literarymama.com/ (April 1, 2012), Marilyn Bousquinm review of Bring Down the Little Birds,
Lit Pub, http://thelitpub.com/ (January 18, 2012), Molly Gaudry, interview with Carmen Gimenez Smith.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
NBC News website, https://www.nbcnews.com/ (March 13, 2014)), “Latino Lens: Feminist Poet Draws Praise for New Book”; (October 24, 2016), Rigoberto González, “Latino Literary Lens: Our Talk with Poet, Publisher Carmen Giménez Smith.”
New Mexico State University website, http://deptweb-p.nmsu.edu/ (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 6,2012), “The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Carmen Giménez Smith.”
So to Speak Journal, http://sotospeakjournal.org/ (June 27, 2018), review of Goodbye, Flicker.
Superstition Review, https://superstitionreview.asu.edu/ (June 27, 2018), Ivy Pochoda, “’The Battle Will Never End’: An Interview with Carmen Giménez Smith.”
Vida, http://www.vidaweb.org/ (October 24, 2016), “Voices of Bettering American Poetry 2015—Carmen Giménez Smith.”
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Liberal Arts website, https://liberalarts.vt.edu/ (June 27, 2018), brief biography.
Volta Blog, https://thevoltablog.wordpress.com/ (January 23, 2014), Rigoberto González, review of Milk & Filth; (June 22,2015), José Angel Araguz, review of Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing.
Waxwing Magazine, http://waxwingmag.org/ (June 27, 2018), Candice Amich, review of Angels of the Americlypse.
Winter Tangerine, http://www.wintertangerine.com/ (May 9, 2018), A.K. Afferez, review of Cruel Futures.
Carmen Giménez Smith
Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith is the daughter of South American immigrants. A CantoMundo fellow, she earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa's Writer Workshop. She writes lyric essays as well as poetry, and is the author of the poetry chapbook Casanova Variations (2009), the full-length collection Odalisque in Pieces (2009), the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (2010). Her 2013 collection Milk and Filth, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest collection of poems, Cruel Futures, is be a volume in the City Lights Spotlight Series in 2018. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019.
Giménez Smith’s work explores issues affecting the lives of females, including Latina identity, and frequently references myth and memory. Wolf Schneider, writing in New Mexico Magazine, described Giménez Smith’s poetry as “waves of free verse, incantation and song.” With the publication of Odalisque in Pieces,Giménez Smith was featured as a New American Poet on the Poetry Society of America’s website.
She co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing (Counterpath Press, 2014), and she is the current editor of The Nation's poetry section, alongside Stephanie Burt. Carmen serves as the publisher of Noemi Press, which has published over 40 full-length collections of poetry and fiction.
Giménez Smith is the chair of the organizing committee for CantoMundo. She is a Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA, where she lives with her husband, writer Evan Lavender Smith, and their two children.
AP1.jpg
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of three collections of poetry -- Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), and Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012) -- and a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010).
She is the recipient of a Juniper Prize for poetry and a fellowship from the Howard Foundation for creative nonfiction.
She is the publisher of Noemi Press, the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at New Mexico State University.
http://deptweb-p.nmsu.edu/~english/mfa/faculty_carmen.php
Tiny Spills: Carmen Giménez Smith
Previous Next
Tabs open on your screen right now:
Gmail, CantoMundo, CFP on Latina Outsiders anthology, lyrics to Norf Norf by Vince Staples, and the website for an electrolysis place in town.
If you had to brag about yourself:
I would brag about my ability to remember the lyrics of almost every New Wave song from the 80s. I also have a pretty good singing voice. My pasta puttanesca is not bad. I’ve been told I’m funny af.
Your writer crush:
If we’re talking just writing, I’m currently crushing (in no particular order) on Tisa Bryant, Natalie Shapero, Sara Borjas, Roque Dalton, Samiya Bashir, and Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Alejandra Pizarnik, and the Peruvian poet Roy Vega Jacome.
Favorite lyric:
Right in the moment, Golden Brown by the Stranglers, but only because it’s playing right now. Warm Leatherette by Grace Jones, Anything by Elliott Smith or Cocteau Twins. I mostly like songs without lyrics like JLin and Boards of Canada
Any place in the world:
In a beach house I would own in Santa Cruz, California. I’d love to live there again someday and want my ashes scattered there when I die.
Best breakfast:
French toast, some fancy-ass thick bacon, poached eggs, and freshly squeezed OJ served in bed.
Favorite online places right now:
Alternet.org, LARB, LitHub, I Blame the Patriarchy, Raw Story, CantoMundo Twitter, and Kanopy Streaming.
Sweetest thing:
My children’s kisses. My husband’s tenderness. My dog’s devotion and his commentary throughout the day (as voiced by our entire family), my friends’ constant and unconditional love.
Your rituals (writing or not):
I write late at night. I have to listen to music because I have a weird brain, and I have to be in comfy clothes. Other rituals: I cannot leave my house with an unmade bed. I’m sometimes late to things for this reason. I text with my friends Ruth Ellen, Rosa, and Susan every single day. I wake up in the hopes that I might become a better person each morning. Finally I ask myself each morning before reading the news, “what fresh hell is this?”
Least impressive thing about you:
I’m a hothead. It gets me into trouble. I get lost finding my way out of a paper bag. I don’t give a shit about fashion and would happily wear a uniform like Charlie Brown.
Favorite space to write:
Bed.
What should we know:
That I have two books coming out: Cruel Futures with City Lights next April and Be Recorder with Graywolf in 2019. I guess also that there’s nothing that I love more than editing books, and I’m a massive design snob. I love parties. That I really struggle to pronounce peculiar. That I have dyscalculia.
Guilty literary pleasure:
True crime. I’ve read all the major serial killer books. I’m sure it’s related to childhood trauma, but whatever, I love it.
Best book nobody talks about:
Are people talking enough about Philosophical Toys by Susana Medina or anything by Luisa Valenzuela or Eduardo Chirinos?
Character (TV, book, movie) you most identify with:
Lady Dynamite but less bipolar.
Last time you lied:
I have children so like five minutes ago.
The lie:
I’m working on stuff from work (and not surfing the web)
Question you secretly want to be asked:
What will you do with your massive lottery winnings?
The answer:
Buy a commune, pay off all my peep’s debts, then move us all into the mountains as we inch towards the apocalypse.
.
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Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing (Counterpath Press, 2014). A former fellow, she now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and as the publisher of Noemi Press. Her next collection of poems, Cruel Futures, will be a volume in the City Lights Spotlight Series in 2018. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She is Professor of English at Virginia Tech and with Stephanie Burt, poetry editor of The Nation.
Carmen Giménez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith Headshot
Poetry
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker.
802-440-4452
carmensmith@bennington.edu
Biography
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing (Counterpath Press, 2014). She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and as the publisher of Noemi Press, which has published over 40 full-length collections of poetry and fiction. Giménez Smith's next collection of poems, Cruel Futures, will be a volume in the City Lights Spotlight Series in 2018. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She is Professor of English at Virginia Tech and with Steph Burt, poetry editor of The Nation.
About This Author
Carmen Giménez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections— Milk and Filth, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. Milk and Filth was a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. A CantoMundo Fellow and formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
Interview with Carmen Giménez Smith
Posted by cjacobs
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Carmen Gimenez Smith
In a time filled to the brim with presses and journals, not to mention all the new MFA programs sprouting up every year and putting out poets by the thousands, it’s hard to keep up with what’s going in the poetry world. Sometimes, poems and, indeed, writers, get lost in the publishing world and don’t get the recognition they deserve. That being said, we at Columbia Poetry Review are always excited by the news of more presses and more journals–more poets, even–and I, for one, am glad Carmen Giménez Smith’s work is not only out in the world, but in our new issue. And, I was even more excited to have the opportunity to ask her to reflect on the poetry world and her place in it:
CPR: What are you currently working on?
CGS: Right now I’m mostly working on Noemi Press, but when I have a minute I’m working on a collection of lyric essays about watching television and on research for my next poetry collection.
CPR: Who was the first poet important to you?
CGS: e.e. cummings’s selected poems was the first book of poems I ever bought. I was a sophomore in high school. The poems were so subversive, both in form and in subject matter, and it called to me. His ear is gorgeous, and I fell in love. He was followed by Eliot, Ginsberg, Plath and Yeats. I had amazing teachers in high school.
CPR: Could you talk a little bit about your writing process/writing routine?
CGS: The reality is that my life is complicated enough that writing brings a bit of disorder to my life. I write with intensity at night, after my kids are in bed, but because I tend to get subsumed by any project I’m working on, I’m taking notes all day. In nonfiction, I tend to work on one project exclusively, but in poetry, I flit around. This way I can’t have any excuse for not writing. If I have several projects going on at once, then when I get frustrated with one, I go to another. In each of the “projects” I work on, I informally define formal and voice parameters so that the work doesn’t all bleed together. But when I’m full-tilt writing, everything works around it. I sleep less, I dress crappy, my kids eat fish sticks, and I stop exercising. Those periods of intensity aren’t sustainable, but they are productive.
CPR: Would you make an observation about today’s poetry landscape?
CGS: Three things. The small press boom has created an amazing array of aesthetic diversity, but now the challenge is reading all of it. We need to have a more rigorous conversation about race and class in poetry. Aesthetic quibbling is useless; the world is ending.
CPR: How has your editorial work with Noemi Press and Puerto del Sol affected your own writing?
CGS: It’s really a privilege to edit books and to help curate a literary magazine. I read pre-publication work constantly, so I feel very aware of what people are doing at this very moment in poetry and non-fiction. I’ve gotten to collaborate with fantastic writers who become great influences in my own work. But most importantly, as an editor, I feel part of a very exciting universe that I also want to participate in as a writer, so these roles keep me ambitious.
CPR: What is currently inspiring you creatively?
CGS: I’ve recently had the great pleasure and honor of reviewing some really terrific memoirs and poetry collections, and writing critically is compelling me to really think about how what I write becomes a site of interpretation for others.
CPR: What did you do today?
CGS: Today I answered email. That’s actually what I spend most of any day doing. Each email is a request of some sort, and each email requires several steps, so I’m constantly uncovering things to do, which horrifies me. I talked to my dear friend and colleague Richard Greenfield on the phone, I did dishes, laundry. Right now, I’m trying to convince Lily Hoang, another dear friend and colleague, to go with me for a fro-yo. Paperwork (including my very exciting sabbatical agreement) went out, and I watched an episode of Archer and Made in Chelsea in the backdrop of all of this busy work. It’s research, *wink.*
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009). She teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
Interviewed by CPR editorial board member Tyler Cain Lacy.
Spotlight: Carmen Gimenez Smith
features, interviews | Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
The Questions of Men
Interview By Krystal Languell
***
On November 16, I interviewed Carmen Giménez Smith via Skype. For the majority of the conversation, I interviewed her as Charles Simic interviewed James Tate in the Summer 2006 issue of The Paris Review; basically, I used Simic’s questions. The goal of repurposing Simic’s questions was to uncover something unexpected, some information that an interviewer of Giménez Smith wouldn’t seek. I wondered also how this interview might problematize the form, uncovering the more predictable question-formation and response process. There’s something of the attorney in a conventional interviewer—in the sense that a question is never asked which s/he doesn’t already know the answer to. It is not the point at all to conceptually ridicule Simic and Tate but to ask questions for which I could not possibly predict the answers. The only rule for the conversation was that it had to take place in real time, not via e-mail, and I permitted myself to skip questions (from the Paris Review interview) that didn’t seem fruitful. I, also, occasionally chime in with addendums and further questions.
***
CS: What is the subversive quality in humor that everyone is worried about?
CGS: Most people think that art is serious and so being not-serious doesn’t often pass as art., and I think there’s a certain level of self-effacement, a sort of good humor, and there’s a way of accessing more base things that people are uncomfortable with and it makes people uncomfortable to be see both debasement and lightness.
What was it like being in college without having planned to be?
It was sort of amazing but I was unprepared for it. I was a really abysmal student. And I really hadn’t planned for it, it was something my high school teacher said maybe you should try it and I was like ok I’ll try it and so I was giving it a shot, right? Until I started taking creative writing classes and I thought oh, I think this is good, and creative writing classes were the only classes, well and my English classes too, were the only ones that I did well at. The other ones, they were all disasters.
What did you do during your summer breaks?
I worked. A lot. When I was a freshman I worked at Macy’s and then I worked in an optometrist’s office for five years. I was very good at my job. No, I was actually terrible at my job. I was good at teaching people how to put in contact lenses, though. That I was good at. I could do that right now. I could teach you right now.
KL: Would you?
Well, sure, you have to like hold the contact and make sure the edges of the contact are facing this way and not that way. You teach people having their eyes wide and looking away and putting it on and then rotating their eyes. It’s been a long time. It’s been 20 years since I knew how to do this. It’s still in me.
Were you publishing already?
Yes. When I was in college, I was. I mean sort of local stuff and really small magazines. But I was publishing in college. I thought that’s what you were supposed to do.
You must have been reading a lot. What sorts of poets did you disapprove of?
I don’t think I disapproved of anything. I liked everything. Even if I didn’t understand it. If I didn’t understand it, I thought I’ve got to figure this out. I wasn’t a huge Wallace Stevens fan until after graduate school, but I could go with anything. I had a great first teacher, Aldon Nielsen, who introduced me to crazy stuff like Harry Matthews and Keith Waldrop, so he set me on my path. I don’t think that there was anything I really hated. I mean even Robert Bly, I was like, whatever. I liked it all.
What about Federico García Lorca?
Yeah. Lorca was great. I liked Lorca’s story, that he was kind of a folklorist. I dug that he liked New York, because I like New York.
Did you try any of the composition strategies from the Surrealist writers, like automatic writing?
Of course I did. I was a graduate student. [Laughs] I think you have to if you go to graduate school, I think that’s required.
Do you collect your images in notebooks?
I don’t really go with images; I go with language, so I don’t collect images per se.
So images just pop up while you are writing?
Um, sure.
Who else were you reading in those years?
In college? I was reading everything. I was reading Li-Young Lee and I was really (and still am) into James Wright. What else was I really into? Carolyn Kizer and the Beats. I read a lot of fiction, though. Angela Carter was a big part of my education as a young college writer. I read a lot of Angela Carter.
Do you revise a lot?
Yes. I only revise. All writing is revision.
You’ve said that you spend three or four hours a day thinking about poetry.
At least. Yes. Yeah. When I’m awake. When I’m asleep it’s the whole time.
So it’s a form of meditation?
I’m too neurotic to meditate.
Were you always a reader of dictionaries?
Actually, I was, yeah. They’re good books. They have a lot of good words in them.
What about satire?
Satire. Yeah, I’m kind of a class warrior so the way I address that is through satire.
When did you first start enjoying jokes?
When I was two.
What makes things funny?
If I say them.
Is this the American condition?
Is what the American condition? This is the end of the American condition. This is it. It’s the end days. So it’s not the American condition anymore, it’s post-America.
Does that mean you don’t have a grand theory of where we went wrong?
Oh, I have lots of theories. But I think we just bought too much stuff and we’re getting fat and we don’t give a shit and that’s where we went wrong.
Do you believe in God?
Nope.
These poems have lines. But readers still wonder what is this? Is this poetry? What do we call it? How do we classify it? Can you respond to that?
Yeah: fuck off.
KL: What distinguishes this book [The City She Was] from your other recent work?
I like the tone of this book. I do think it’s funny and dark in a way that’s really exciting to me. It’s located. It’s about San Francisco in the early aughts during a time when the world was really changing and started feeling a little overwhelming for the speaker. And so it’s about the saturation of the city and being a young woman and trying to figure shit out and making a lot of mistakes. There’s a part of Ovid’s Poems of Exile and he’s lamenting—he’s in exile and it sucks, but he’s also lamenting the loyalties, his friendships, what it feels like to be away. When I started writing the book I thought it would be interesting to think of someone being in exile in the place she is. I mean exile is sort of a dark, charged political thing. But I think there are different kinds of exile, and this is like a psychological exile. And that’s what sometimes happens when you live in a city—you’re surrounded by people and you are kind of navigating it on your own, and maybe even trapped there.
KL: Is this a narrative book?
I don’t think that you could follow a story. Some of it is really fantastical and not-real. It’s pretend. It’s a figurative world, and a fabulist world sometimes. And a sinister world. And I mean, I’m a poet. I like figurative language so I think that plays a big part in how it works.
How does this book fit in to your body of work?
It’s a different book because I know more about writing since I wrote the first one, more about what I want to say and how I can say it. I keep working at it and I do things I wanted to do but wasn’t able to. The language is really different. I feel loosened away from this more traditional lyric and I’m trying to play with the lyric a little bit more. I think I’m going to be struggling and questioning and interrogating the lyric for the rest of my life and so this is just one experiment in that.
What does that mean for you — interrogating the lyric?
I’m thinking about time and subjectivity and how a speaker creates different subjectivities in the lyric. And also the more technical aspects and how you can push against it or resist it or create a kind of celebration of what I’m calling a writerly lyric, like Roland Barthes’ idea of the writerly. That’s vague, but those are the ideas I’m thinking about. Another manuscript I just finished [titled Be Recorder] is all about distilling the language and the idea of litany and meditation. So I’m thinking about what the next thing is going to be—maybe a bit elegiac. So the whole universe of it. I want to spend time in every galaxy. Are there galaxies in universes or is it the other way around?
I think you had it right. Well, and we don’t know about anything outside our universe so who knows?
The truth is out there.
Maybe. I don’t know. What does that even mean? Because of what I chose to omit from our model interview, the source of which I’ll reveal to you when we’re done, I’m wondering if in your life you feel that your childhood and your parents continue to have some impact on your writing.
Yes. Bring Down the Little Birds was the first volume of writing about my mom. The next poetry project I’m going to do is a book that deals explicitly with her Alzheimer’s. I feel like I’m processing stuff. I’m obsessed with my mom and that’s a big part of it. I think my autobiographical work gets coded or played with or I deal with it in my non-fiction. I feel that’s a more appropriate place for that.
This is a different book from the one you got the Howard fellowship for?
That’s something else. The Howard is for a book that I’m writing about failure and so that’s about my dad.
[Laughing] So the Alzheimer’s book is non-fiction?
Well, that one’s going to be a hybrid. I’m thinking of someone like Kristin Prevallet and also Susan Howe, Eleni Sikelianos. That kind of thing. Brenda Coultas. Those are the writers I’m thinking about when I’m working on the next poetry book.
I want to make sure I ask you about class identity and whether you feel you are a poet of the working-class. And also what you feel your relationship to the Occupy movement may or may not be as a poet.
I’m a professor. I’m part of the middle class. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t the case. I’m really fucking lucky that I have this great job and I’m able to support my family. But that’s not how I grew up, and so I’m really preoccupied with the idea of how lucky I am to be in this situation. But it seems to me we’re becoming like a South American country in which these huge disparities in class harm people. It’s upsetting to me.
The Occupy movement: I admire the ideas. It’s distant from me because I’m not there, I can’t see it. And I’m not doing anything about it. I mean sure I could post stuff on Facebook about it but that’s not really doing anything about it. And I’ve got to figure out how I can do something about it. I just haven’t figured that out yet.
***
Krystal Languell is the author of Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox). She was a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as a collaborative board member for Belladonna* Series as well as editor-in-chief at Noemi Press.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The battle [for gender equity] will never end. It is an ongoing battle. We’re not only fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for our mothers, and our grandmothers, and our daughters, and their daughters.”
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections—Milk and Filth, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. Milk and Filth was a finalist for the NBCC Award. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. A former Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
Carmen Gimenez Smith's Website
“The Battle Will Never End,” An Interview with Carmen Giménez Smith
This interview was conducted over the phone by Interview Editor Lauren Fosgett. Of the process, she said, “It was such a pleasure to interview Carmen Giménez Smith. I enjoyed reading her memoir and her poetry collections and I felt a deep connection to her work. I was eager to ask her about her views as a feminist and Latina writer.” In this interview, she discusses the malleability of stories, feminism in the 21st century, and the synthesis of poetry and memoir.
Superstition Review: First, I want to congratulate you on the news that Milk and Filth is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. What kinds of emotions has this nomination brought on for you?
Carmen Gimenez Smith: Surprise and shock and awe have been the best description. I was nervous about the book I guess in the sense that this book is saying crazy stuff. I also felt a lot of pride that a book by a Latina feminist would get that recognition, and that meant a lot to me. And also I felt like it was an homage to the feminists who came before me. So I’m just really proud of it. But you know it felt like a prank, it felt like a joke. It took me a long time to actually believe that it happened because it’s supposed to be something that happens to really famous people.
SR: Do you feel that now that you’ve received this award that you’re more recognized for your work?
CGS: That’s a good question. I feel like most people are reading the book in a way that they may not have before, because of the award. In the way that any kind of recognition—I just had a great review in Poetry magazine and the close attention to the book was really an honor so I think people are coming to the book with an open heart and an open mind, which is exactly how I wanted. So I think it does help the book in terms of how people come to it.
SR: Do you feel this award is different from some of the other honors you’ve received?
CGS: I think any honor is important in a career, but it’s the biggest honor I’ve received. And I think what was really significant for me was that I was around people I’ve admired for so long, like Lucie Brock-Broido who has been such an important influence in my work. Not that I consider myself to be in her league, but just to be in her presence was really, really remarkable.
SR: Milk and Filth is divided in three parts: “Gender Fables,” “Small Deaths,” and “Becoming.” How did you decide to organize your collection in this way?
CGS: I wanted to for one, address what I found was problematic in uses of gender in fables and stories about women and the way fairytales get adapted. I wanted to do a kind of rehabilitation work. I felt like the subsequent sections were primarily—the second section paid homage to what I think were important Second-Wave Feminist strategies, primarily the personalist political and also just aesthetic gestures that I found really influential in the anthology No More Masks. The third section was my suggestion of a new mythology of new icons that feature Ana Mendieta, who is a strong influence in my work and that’s how that came about.
But this is organized by many people I had great feedback from my editors at Arizona. They’re one of the best presses in the world. I tried to listen to how they saw the book unfold and that order was one of their ideas. Earlier, the book didn’t have sections. We found a way of dividing the book to tell a story.
SR: In an interview with The Lit Pub, you stated the original title for your new collection was Gender Fables. What motivated you to change the title and how did you ultimately settle on Milk and Filth?
CGS: The book actually had really cranky titles for a while. One of them was A Womyn’s Manifesto. Another one was The Devil Inside of Me which was based on a work by Ana Mendieta. Gender Fables was too soft, and it was too liberal, that was the critique that I got from the press. I asked my very dear friend and a poet whose influence was also really important in the book, the poet Roselle Gala, what I should call the book and she read the manuscript and she said “it’s about milk and filth, it’s in the book. You say ‘milk and filth’, you should call it that.” So I did, and I actually didn’t think the publisher would go for it but they totally went for it. People love the title, they love it, so I’m glad we went that way.
SR: I love it. I think it’s brilliant, and I love that Gender Fables actually became the title for the first part and you were able to at least incorporate that into the collection.
CGS: I’m a hoarder. I don’t throw things away, so I thought if I can’t have it my way, let me have it this other way.
SR: What is most important to you when titling your work?
CGS: I have had very little hand in actually titling my own books. I’m trying to think, “Have I titled a book of my own?” No, I haven’t. I like titling poems; I’m good at doing that. I’m terrible at titling books. I think that the title of something is in a way the first line of something, but it also can work as a contradiction or create friction. That tends to be the way I title poems. It also can create context. For example if someone is writing a poem about their grandparents in a car crash, and they spend three stanzas describing it when the poem isn’t really about the car crash itself, it’s about how they feel about it. The shortcut would be to call it “The Car Crash” and that doesn’t always work, but I think titles can streamline things.
SR: You draw from mythology and literature in your poems, from the goddess Demeter, to the Virgin Guadalupe, to Nabokov’s Lolita. What themes or motifs do these myths help you express?
CGS: I guess I was thinking about a feminist mythological literary canon. In my first book I had a poem called “Prelapsarian” and I was interested in the way the mythology of Lilith has to do with a kind of silencing. She becomes this villain, and often women are either saints or villains. Villainy tends to manifest itself as a result of trying to take action, trying to change things, trying to have power. I think power is very, very threatening. An example is Amaldiche which is a very maligned character in history. I’m interested in how she, problematically, gained access to power, and thinking about that, to be maligned that way, that she participated in conquests, problematic conquests, but conquests nonetheless, is very interesting to me.
Another example is La Llorona and thinking about what is the source of her loss? What was her motivation? Why do we need her as a cultural figure? What function does she serve for us? We tend to think again of her as villainous, but circumstances are always behind a woman’s story, especially a problematic story, and I was curious to explore that.
SR: Do you find that that exploration is why you keep returning to these themes and myths in your work?
CGS: Yeah. The book Goodbye, Flicker is sort of my “beta” version of Milk and Filth in the sense that, my mom told stories, and yet she revised stories. She didn’t tell them the way they were canonically expressed. She told them the way she thought I needed them, or how she needed them. For that reason, I realized stories were malleable, and especially stories that women have access to, needed that malleability. In Goodbye, Flicker, I retold fairytales. I located them in relation to a young Latina girl from a poor family who wants the same things everybody else wants, yet has these limitations and has to create these alternate universes in which she escapes to find the sublime. I guess I’m just going to keep doing that in different ways.
SR: That actually reminds me of situations where parents are reading books to their children and their daughters want to change the protagonist to a female character. I heard a story where one father changed the story where Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit was a woman, and went through the tales as a female hobbit. I love that malleability and revising of stories.
CGS: It’s important. The idea of storytelling, even ironically or historically, they have been sort of female. They are female traditions that are then appropriated through male hegemony. Women were illiterate for a long time.
SR: One of my favorite lines in “Epigrams for a Lady” is “the best enemy against antagonism is more howl and less whisper.” How important is it to you to be an agitator?
CGS: Super important. The interesting thing about being an agitator is that first, you’re a trouble maker and a pain in the ass, and that’s really discouraged. I gave a paper at a conference once and I talked about the difficulties of being a woman of color in the academy. I described how one of the advantages of having white privilege is you can be disliked and still have agency. That’s not as easy for women, especially women of color, because there are all kinds of terrible stereotypes like the spicy hot-tempered Latina or the angry black woman. So those types of behaviors are really discouraged. They’re dangerous and transgressive, yet those are the only kinds of roles that change the world. People don’t change the world by sitting back and being quiet and reflective. People change the world by pushing people and making people uncomfortable and pushing people to see the things they don’t want to see.
SR: Do you ever find there are situations where a whisper might be more effective?
CGS: Absolutely. As a poet I have a commitment to the lyric voice. I think of the misty poets and ways in which that work, and say the work of Pablo Neruda who is a socialist and other political poets who use different kinds of rhetorical persuasion, and so a whisper sometimes is really effective. I think in urgent situations, desperate times call for desperate measures.
SR: “Gender Fables” focuses exclusively on the power struggles between gender roles. What is the message you want to send as a feminist in the 21st century?
CGS: The battle will never end. It is an ongoing battle. We’re not only fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for our mothers, and our grandmothers, and our daughters, and their daughters.
SR: How do you define feminism for the 21st century?
CGS: Equal rights. The most revolutionary thing that can happen right now, which is really ironic to me, is if the Equal Rights Amendment passed. There’s still a small cadre of women who are trying to activate the Equal Rights Amendment, but to have the government actually ratify language that says women have equal rights, because the top-down effect of that would be tremendous. I think that we have to protect our daughters from oversexualization and from having to deal with their bodies being their only instrument that gives them access to capital and change and agency.
SR: In a conversation with Sheryl Luna and other Latina writers, you mentioned that your identity as a feminist is “inextricably tied to my identity as a Latina.” What is the relationship between these two identities in your work?
CGS: I think it’s hard to be a woman, and I think it’s really hard to be a woman of color. The example is watching my mom try to succeed in a country, because she wasn’t good in English, because she was dark-skinned. One time I remember she was trying to rent a house and she couldn’t find a house and she kept calling all of these places and they would say “oh we’ve been rented.” I was skeptical of that, and I called one of the places she had called and said, “Hi, I’m calling about the house.” They said, “Oh yeah! It’s available, come in to take a look,” and it was a house my mom had just called about and had been told it had been rented out. I’m not saying that’s the worst thing that ever happened to my mom, but I thought “is this 1957?!” I couldn’t believe that had happened.
I also feel like, historically, the interests of feminism haven’t completely embraced the kinds of class and race issues that emerged for women of color and so I’m interested in a more inclusive feminism. That means that when I perform or speak as a feminist, it is as a feminist of color.
SR: How has your Latina heritage influenced your work?
CGS: When I was in graduate school I gave a reading, and one of my colleagues said, “your work sounds like even though it’s in English it’s in translation.” At the time I thought, “am I supposed to be offended by that? Is this not a good thing?” So you realize it’s a good thing because I have this deep syntax in my work that comes from the fact that Spanish was my first language, that English was something I acquired. There are also all these cultural oddities that have become part of the fabric of my world and a part of the stories that I tell.
SR: At , you state, “I write not so much to communicate with others, but to communicate with myself.” What differences did you find in this self-discovery between writing poetry and writing a memoir?
CGS: I contradict myself all the time because there is a person in my life, in my world that I write to, in my mind. She is my audience, she is who I want to hear what I have to say. There’s a way in which that She then also becomes general. I begin writing with myself and privately because it gives me the permission to say things that I am afraid of or ashamed to say. I think the difference between poetry and memoir is that memoir’s specific function is to tell a story. Poetry uses a story toward a rhetorical end.
I think now in literature, the lines between genres are becoming more and more blurred. I’m interested to see what that means and how that changes what we do as poets, what we do as memoirists, and what we do as novelists.
SR: Your memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, is very much a lyric essay. In what ways did your poetry background influence your approach to nonfiction? How did you alternate between poetry and memoir?
CGS: Probably the idea of compression. My attention to just sentences, I realized I was writing sentences and there had to be a kind of progression that took place. I had to be able to compress action into sentences. Also with the form of the lyric essay, I had to think about how those gaps and silences were productive, and stanza breaks also require the same level of “productivity”. It wasn’t easy to do though, I had a lot of help. My husband is a fiction writer and he pointed me to places I needed to reorganize so I was actually telling a story, and that was a learning experience for sure.
SR: Has your relationship with your husband, writer Evan Lavender-Smith, influenced your writing? Describe what it’s like for two writers to live and work together.
CGS: Enormously. We talk a lot about writing, we share our work. He writes such gorgeous, dense sentences with such music. We’ve been married so long, that music has become part of my heart and my thinking, and I’m glad of that, I’m thankful for that.
SR: In what ways has having children affected your writing experience?
CGS: I just don’t have very much time to write. I have to be really economic about what I write. I also have to be thoughtful about how what I write might affect my children when they’re adults. I try not to write about them and when I do I try not to use their names, to protect their privacy.
SR: What does your writing space look like?
CGS: In my bed. I’m surrounded by books or my iPad. I don’t have a desk of my own.
Carmen Giménez Smith
Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She writes lyric essays as well as poetry, and is the author of the poetry chapbook Casanova Variations (2009), the full-length collection Odalisque in Pieces (2009), and the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else(2010). Her most recent book, Milk and Filth (2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Giménez Smith’s work explores issues affecting the lives of females, including Latina identity, and frequently references myth and memory.
Latino Literary Lens: Our Talk with Poet, Publisher Carmen Giménez Smith
by Rigoberto González / Oct.24.2016 / 4:41 AM ET
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Gimenez SmithCarmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith is one of the most productive Latinas in American literature, and her mission is ensuring that innovative poetry connects with varied audiences.
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An award-winning poet herself, her books include "Odalisque in Pieces" (2009), "The City She Was" (2011), "Goodbye, Flicker" (2012), and "Milk & Filth" (2013), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her verse has been widely celebrated for its lyrical and political perspectives on femininity and feminism, and for the way it reinvigorates poetic language with the use of such devices as the fragment, associative meaning and elliptical storytelling.
She is also the author of a memoir, "Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else" (2010), which creates a portrait of a Latina in the contemporary world as she navigates her many roles, from motherhood to working professional, negotiating the big heartaches and small triumphs that come with the responsibility of being one busy woman.
Six years after the release of that memoir, Giménez Smith continues to cultivate a career that keeps her active. Besides being a writer and a professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, she also serves as publisher for Noemi Press and until recently, as editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol.
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Gimenez SmithCarmen Gimenez Smith
Founded in 2002, Noemi Press is dedicated to publishing and promoting experimental and innovative poetry. Since 2013, it has also been housing the Akrilica Series. Inspired by a book from 1989 by Juan Felipe Herrera, the current poet laureate of the United States, the series is open exclusively to Latino poets whose verse challenges the linguistic conventions of American poetry.
We caught up with the author and editor for a brief chat about the writing life, Noemi Press and the ever-growing importance of Latino letters in American culture.
Without a doubt, your prolific output and the critical response you receive for your writing positions you as a leading Latino voice of today. During this troubled election year climate, why is poetry — an in particular Latino poetry — essential to the national conversations about culture and politics?
In his wonderful essay “On the Locus Amoenus,” Brian Blanchfield writes that poetry is “another art that pulls attention to the medium, language, defamiliarizing it from its usual, invisible, directly communicative and expository function, thereby discovering it afresh…”
Language is being used so destructively, just words, just bits of sound, and I think the most exciting poets of the moment (Daniel Borzutsky, whose book was recently long-listed for National Book Award; the inimitable Bhanu Kapil; and Elizabeth Acevedo, who is bringing the personal into the political) are working assiduously to undo the terrible ways we undo justice and even basic kindness on all platforms of media.
RELATED: What I've Learned: 'Poetry Chose Me,' Says Writer Erika L. Sánchez
The Latinx population has a complex relationship to notions of citizenship. I know that I certainly grew up feeling very proud to be an American, and although I experienced institutional racism, I never thought nationalism and racism would be wound together in such a dark way as it is in this very moment.
I also think that we can reach into our recent political history in the emancipatory work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Alurista, and our poet laureate—as well as the historical tradition of political poetry in all of Latin America—to find great knowledge and prescience, and that’s where I find myself more and more. So currently I’m investigating the work of the Kloaka Movement from Peru, just looking for perspective on being at such odds with an oligarchy selling a nation on false boundaries and differences.
Congratulations on the longevity and success of Noemi Press! As a publisher, how have you stayed true to your vision from the start of this venture and in what ways have you had to adapt to a dynamic publishing industry?
The press is a collaborative effort comprising of an incredible staff of editors who are active participants in the day-to-day decision making of the press.
"Milk & Filth" by Carmen Gimenez Smith.
"Milk & Filth" by Carmen Gimenez Smith.Carmen Gimenez Smith.
Noemi editors are instructors, students, and writers who search for manuscripts that provide us with what we find missing as writers, readers, and teachers.
We seek exciting voices that surprise us, and we are lucky enough to be part of communities that are similarly looking to provoke and interrogate. Because of this important collaborative venture, we’ve had really great success, not only with the books we’ve published, but also in terms of the kind of work we have the honor to consider.
Lately I’ve been most thrilled about the success of Infidel Poetics, a short-form poetics series, which has featured work by Sarah Vap, Douglas Kearney, the Blunt Research Group, and work forthcoming from Chaun Webster, Tonya Foster, and Roberto Tejada. Because in many ways we’re still a micropress, we have the latitude to pick really risky and hard-to-classify writing, and I think Infidel exemplifies that commitment.
More and more of our books feature study/teaching guides, which takes into account that poetry is often, though sadly, mostly read in classrooms, and that’s definitely been a change in our thinking. Hopefully, we’ll continue to be an access point for young readers and writers.
Can you tell us more about the Akrilica Series? I believe this is a co-publishing initiative with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Why the need to highlight innovative writing from the Latino community?
The AKRILICA series was a direct result of conversations I’d been having with Francisco Aragón about wanting to create a space for work by Latinx writers working from a more innovative aesthetic.
We felt the publication possibilities for Latinx Lit in contemporary poetry could be expanded to include works whose content comprehensively reimagined and de-defined genre forms as much as they interrogated political points.
"You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior" by Carolina Ebeid, published by Noemi Press.
"You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior" by Carolina Ebeid, published by Noemi Press.Noemi Press.
These conversations began to really come to a head in 2008 at a week-long residency at the Ragdale Foundation that was convened by Letras Latinas.
The residency brought together eight Latina/o poet-editors, including J. Michael Martínez, a Noemi editor and amazing poet in his own right, and two poet-editors who would go on to become AKRILICA authors: elena minor and Roberto Harrison.
In the months after, Noemi and Letras Latinas formed a co-publishing partnership to create the series.
The series has published Chloe Garcia Roberts, Sandy Florian, and is — with the support of various organizations such as New Mexico State University and Letras Latinas as well as through private support under the direction of our board member Blas Falconer — publishing the work of Carolina Ebeid, Vanessa Villareal, Manuel Paul López, and reprinting Jennifer Tamayo’s groundbreaking You Da One.
Since there's such a range of good and exciting work being done by so many poets, our ambition is to provide the most comprehensive and inclusive picture of Latinx poetry we can render.
You are also a Canto Mundo fellow, an organization that nurtures Latino poets across the country. How has being part of Canto Mundo helped you shape an identity as a Latina poet and what role does this community of writers have in shaping American letters?
My involvement with CantoMundo has changed me as a person and as a poet, for the better. The conference is a space where I do deep interrogative work on my poetry and subjectivity. Since there’s no particular aesthetic at work, I’m attuned to a wider register of influences, and in that way, I think my work feels as if it comes from a much deeper well. The Latinx poetry community is incredibly supportive and I think organizations like CantoMundo are key to creating that progress.
While Latinidad is not some monolithic identity, contemporary political rhetoric has forced us into one, so the camaraderie is also vital as we take back our identities as individual artists. I now have the great honor of serving on the organizing committee, and I hope to give back by providing fellows with insights on publishing.
"Bring Down the Little Birds" was such a prescient book because you’ve only gotten busier and more in demand. This hasn’t slowed down your literary output, however. What valuable lessons have you learned about the writing life (its joys and frustrations) that you’d like to share with other aspiring writers? And what’s next for you?
I am most fulfilled by collaboration in all the forms it can take, which is also how I am able to take part in so many different projects, but over the past few years I’ve certainly found much less time to write. I realize now that that means I’ve had to become more patient with how long a project takes, and I don’t love that.
I still do give myself over to short periods of complete writing abandon and the house gets dirty and I don’t sleep and the kids get cranky and emails stay unanswered, but I think it all self-corrects along the way. I had a month-long residency at The Hermitage Foundation at the beginning of the summer, and finished a manuscript called Post-Identity, and got well on my way into another one called Said Inheritance, so I do feel a bit sated, but it’s never enough.
With that said, all of the different types of work I do nourish me, make me a better and more elastic poet, so I’m willing to wait. I am motivated by my communities and by the work we do together. There are many types of creating. This interview is a type of creating, mentorship is a type of creating, publishing is a type of creating. Sometimes one or another seems to take over for a while, but that’s okay. Even if I’m impatient, the writing is not. It stays in me, and it knows I’ll return, more excited than ever.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “I don’t understand why it’s okay to eschew feminism when at its core feminism’s basic tenet is that women deserve to be treated equally,” she told Critical Mass online interviewer Dianca London Potts. “To be opposed to what essentially amounts to a civil rights movement should embarrass people. For this reason, all of my work is feminist and my intention is to continue to find ways to deepen the feminism and social possibility in my work.”
NBCC Poetry Finalist Carmen Giménez in Conversation with MFA Student Dianca London Potts
by admin | Feb-21-2014
Thanks to The School of Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of their students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2013 in our 30 Books 2013 series.
Dianca London Potts, on behalf of the School of Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Carmen Giménez Smith, via email, about her book Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press), which is among the final five selections, in the category of Poetry, for the 2013 NBCC awards.
Dianca London Potts: Throughout Milk and Filth your poems reconstruct and re-imagine female embodiment through the use of legend, lore, and contemporary culture. Lolita, Demeter, Llorona, the witches of Oz, etc. Each depiction is cultivated with subtlety, yet evokes an often unsaid truth about the complexities of female selfhood and identity. If you had to articulate what that truth is, as depicted throughout the stanzas of Milk and Filth, what would it be?
Carmen Giménez Smith: Milk and Filth is an "ethnography" of my feminism, an archaeology informed by five decades of technological, social, and cultural fracas. As a Gen-Xer, I came of age when feminism was confronted with new reproductive technologies, the internet, social media, torture porn, etc. I was often outraged and surprised at instances of misogyny. When I was in my early teens, I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which features a group of (admittedly problematic) radical feminists called the Ellen Jamesians, and I thought, "Yes, I want to be that." Popular culture projects the feminine as a very profane space, making the subversive human person I was think it was the best place ever. Growing up Latina has its own concomitant gender problems and mythologies that I also actively resisted. My wonder at these types of oppressions never wavered or were borne down. Through this resistance I discovered artists like Gloria Anzaldua, Mina Loy, Cherie Moraga, Ana Mendieta, Claude Cahun, and Cecilia Vicuña, but also Joan Rivers, Divine, Madonna, Yma Sumac, and Patty Hearst. Society has so many arcane and fantastical ways to suppress female power, and only really fun things get treated this way. My mother told me really subversive fairy tales, which is what my previous book, Goodbye, Flicker explores. I think it was her attempt to write herself into the story and so Milk and Filth was also, in part, a way to translate or revise stories that excluded or distorted the self I occupy. Primarily though, I wanted to write a tribute album, an homage to the amazing anthology No More Masks. Reading that book changed my life, set me on an important political path, so I wanted to evoke that affect, that mood of radical possibility and truth.
DLP: "Your Data is Political" delves into the complexities of technology, selfhood, and gender identity. Within the multiple hyperrealities fostered by the duplicitous nature of online and offline embodiment, we as individuals, as women are "the real and the fable." In what way does this mirror or serve as a commentary of the embodiment of the female poet?
CGS: I have two answers to this question. One: The internet has made everyone an expert on nothing except frothing at the mouth to harm other people. We’re becoming cruel and dark because of the internet, but the internet is also is an enormous catalyzing force that can be used for good and that will be where the important cultural battles that await us will take place. Two: I feel guilty that I don’t keep up my Twitter account, and that I have to be on the internet, which requires invention and Photoshop and fake smiles, all this garbage that has nothing to do with the world.
DLP: As the third wave of feminism ebbs into the fourth, many women find themselves hesitant to define their creative work as feminist. Do you consider your work intentionally feminist? If so, how does the feminist lens inform your poetics?
CGS: I don’t understand why it’s okay to eschew feminism when at its core feminism's basic tenet is that women deserve to be treated equally. To be opposed to what essentially amounts to a civil rights movement should embarrass people. For this reason, all of my work is feminist and my intention is to continue to find ways to deepen the feminism and social possibility in my work. My good friend, the poet Roberto Tejada, has led me deeper into the world of collaborative art for social justice, and that’s where I find myself right now, writing a polemic on post-identity that echoes the b-boy/griot spoken word sound I discovered in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrilica and Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T.
DLP: The act of giving birth, giving birth to human life, to a creative body of work, can alter or expand an individual. It’s transformative, visceral, and at times scarring. How has Milk and Filth’s inception, completion, and publication impacted your identity as an individual? As a poet? As a woman?
CGS: This is my feminist barbaric yawp, my Iron John, and as I was writing it, I felt that if I didn’t "go there" the way I wanted, then I was a coward.
DLP: In the final poem in your collection, "When God Was a Woman," you cultivate a reality where a matriarch occupies a space traditionally viewed as patriarchal. Depicting a woman as God, as a divine creator, is as provocative as it is brilliant. What led to the inception of this re-envisioning of God and origin?
CGS: "When God Was a Woman" is based on a book by the same title written by Merlin Stone that I read in a religious studies course taught by Mira Zussman at San Jose State University. Stone, an art historian, points to archaeological artifacts that allude to prehistoric matriarchal religions, which was an important discovery to me. I had always suspected that the feminine was the truly divine, and this book confirmed it for me. I've written some version of that poem in all of my books, but this was the book that I wanted to most explicitly speak to my eventual feminist précis of the book’s story.
DLP: The poems featured in the first section of your collection, 'Gender Fables,' equate female selfhood with the terrestrial while those featured in 'Small Deaths' navigate the implications of self-actualized identity within a digitized landscape. What are the implications of organic and synthesized environments in the cultivation of self? Of poetic narrative?
CGS: That's a great question, and one that I hadn't really considered until now. I see the first section as folkloric and organic revisions of commonly accepted tropes of female power, like the book's mythos. The second section is a flash-forward to third wave iterations of second wave tropes and more contemporary notions of "reaction." The final section, which is largely composed of an ekphrastic work on Ana Mendieta, is the next, the speaker's aspiration, the first breath of the next work. The book had a few aphoristic works, which ironically point in two historical directions—Nietzsche would have been really good at Twitter. Ultimately though, that tension of the synthetic and the terrestrial probably emerges as a result of the adaptation of the old with the new.
Carmen-author-photoCarmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks—Reason's Monsters (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011), Can We Talk Here (Belladonna Books, 2011) and Glitch (Dusie Kollectiv, 2009). She has also co-edited a fiction anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation.
potts_diancaDianca London Potts is a first year Fiction student in the M.F.A. program and is currently working on a collection of short stories and first person plural vignettes. Her work has appeared in APIARY Magazine, Philadelphia City Paper, and New Wave Vomit.
Voices of Bettering American Poetry 2015 — Carmen Giménez Smith
What do you have to say to those who would suggest your writing is too intense or upsetting?
Take it slow. Take a break. Take a cry. Take a bath. Dig back in.
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What advice do you have for young and emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities? What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
We have to be good to each other, including listening to each other, reaching out to one another. Don’t be scared into careerism that pits us against one another. Instead, always aim to move forward, together.
What advice do you have toward readers who want to be allies?
carmen-gimenez-smith-angels-of-the-americlypse-anthology-of-new-latin-writing-cover
Be afraid. Be okay being afraid, and be okay being uncomfortable. You might get hurt, but remember how often marginalized are hurting. Also, just generally—shut up once in a while.
What needs to change in the educational/academic world, with regard to poetry and writing? What can literary educators do to affect this change? What can students do?
Academics and educators need to put themselves at risk, put their institutions at risk. We have to love each other and justice more than we love our own safety and comfort. No one said it will be easy. But listen and act. Don’t be afraid to confront systems and perpetrators. If you’re afraid, imagine how your students feel.
How do you feel that writers or editors can engage in topics of oppression and violence without falling into tropes of exploitation?
For editors specifically, provide opportunities for marginalized people, but you also don’t have to rush to be the first/only. Promote writers and organizations engaging in oppression, even if it’s not your magazine or organization. Make your space a place for multi-layered voices that nuance, even if you are not the publisher. This way, you are a part of a community, instead of rushing to be The Voice of Oppression or Violence.
~~~
Carmen Gimenez SmithCARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH is the author of a memoir and four poetry collections—including Milk and Filth, finalist for the 2013 NBCC award in poetry. With John Chavez, she edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing published by Counterpath Press. A CantoMundo Fellow, she teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the publisher of Noemi Press.
~~~
This interview series is conducted with authors from the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015. As Bettering’s editors wrote in their call for nominations, “Our efforts will intentionally shift favor so that the literary landscape within this anthology reflects a ranging plurality of voices in American poetry and illuminates the possibilities of sharing space … This anthology represents just one concerted effort to better American poetry, but it is one that we hope will resonate.”
Bettering has sought to delve deeper with the poets selected for the anthology. These questions are composed collectively by the editors, with the belief that the literary community needs a polyphony not only of poems but of poets’ voices.
Carmen Giménez Smith
b. 1971
http://www.carmengimenezsmith.com/
Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Cruel Futures (City Lights, 2018); Milk and Filth (2013), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is the author of the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (University of Arizona Press, 2010), which received an American Book Award. She also coedited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath Press, 2014).
Giménez Smith is chair of the planning committee for CantoMundo and is the publisher of Noemi Press. A professor of English at Virginia Tech she is also a poetry editor of The Nation, with Stephanie Burt.
Poems by Carmen Giménez Smith
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Carmen Giménez-Smith was born on February 20, 1971, in New York City. She received a BA in English from San Jose State University in 1994 and an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
She is the author of the poetry collections Cruel Futures (City Lights, 2018); Milk & Filth (University of Arizona Press, 2013); Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011); and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona Press, 2009).
Her poetry is well known for its portrayal of the experiences and histories of women, particularly those of Latina identity. The poet Dana Levin says of her poems, “It’s as if Giménez-Smith threw a stone called ‘girl’ into the pong of psyche—a psyche both personal and collective—and these are the ripples.”
Giménez-Smith says, “I think that the canon privileges male histories, both political and private, whereas women’s same histories are seen as domestic trifles. So I intend to go as deep as possible into those trifles.” She is also the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (University of Arizona Press, 2010).
The recipient of an American Book Award and a fellowship from the Howard Foundation, Giménez-Smith was named one of Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets in 2009. She currently teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while also serving as the publisher of Noemi Press and the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. She lives with her husband, the writer Evan Lavender-Smith, and their children in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Cruel Futures (City Lights, 2018)
Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press, 2013)
Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011)
Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona Press, 2009)
Prose
Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (University of Arizona Press, 2010)
Couldn't copy and paste, but CV can be viewed at link.
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Carmen Gimenez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith
Carmen Giménez Smith
Professor
Office
201 Shanks Hall
181 Turners St NW
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Phone
540-231-7696
Email
carmens@vt.edu
Department Membership
English
Expertise
Poetry
Lyric Essays
Latina Identity
Professional Activities
Poetry Editor, The Nation
2017—present
Publisher, Noemi Press
Education
M.F.A. in Creative Writing, University of Iowa
B.A. in English, San Jose State University
Awards and Honors
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, for Milk and Filth (2013)
Juniper Prize for Poetry for Goodbye, Flicker (2012)
Howard Foundation Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction (2011–12)
American Book Award for Bring Down the Little Birds (2010)
Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets Series (2009)
Selected Publications
Poetry Collections
Cruel Futures (City Lights, 2018)
Milk and Filth (The University of Arizona Press, 2013)
Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012)
The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011)
Odalisque in Pieces (The University of Arizona Press, 2009)
Memoir
Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (The University of Arizona Press, 2010)
Anthologies
Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, edited with John Chávez (Counterpath Press, 2014)
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited with Kate Bernheimer (Penguin, 2010)
Additional Information
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of five poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds (2010) and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for Goodbye, Flicker (2012). She also coedited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (2014), an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and on the board of RASA, which sponsors the Thinking Its Presence conference on race and art. She serves as the publisher of Noemi Press. She is also the poetry editor for The Nation.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “powerful,” “Gimenez Smith’s crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Print Marked Items Cruel Futures
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p50. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Cruel Futures
Carmen Gimenez Smith. City Lights, $15.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-87286-758-1
Gimenez Smith (Milk and Filth) seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. She depicts the myriad ways that a woman's sense of self is at the mercy of assigned gender roles. "I grew up on the edge/ of your electrified fence/ like a weed," Gimenez Smith writes, "I live on the corner of identity/ and shadow." She moves from youth to midlife and motherhood, shifting perspective between insider and outsider, and picking out the "thousand points of light" that pierce the blurry borderlands where nature and nurture collide. She links the concept of becoming a "monster" to women's defiance of prescribed roles, their need to break out of which makes them dangerous: "I'm a monster/ of my own making." In "Dear Medusa," Gimenez Smith treats the epistle's subject as a fallen hero and a source of strength who gave a "gift/ to pre-feminism." She writes, "You had enormous power, which people/ called a curse, but it made you one of the first witches." Cultural phenomena such as marriage and television come under scrutiny, and she handles mental illness issues with great care, particularly bipolar disorder and dementia. Gimenez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cruel Futures." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 50. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357496/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6a84642e. Accessed 2 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357496
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Gimenez Smith, Carmen. Odalisque
in Pieces
Karla Huston
Library Journal.
134.17 (Oct. 15, 2009): p81. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Gimenez Smith, Carmen. Odalisque in Pieces. Univ. of Arizona. 2009. c.80p. ISBN 978-08165-2788-5. pap. $15.95. POETRY
In her debut collection, Gimenez Smith suggests an odalisque (a female harem slave) is a woman fragmented: "Once when I was harmless/ and didn't know any better,// I lay wedged in the middle of daylight,/// then I vanished." In 42 poems, some complicated, some transparent, some short lyrics, some longer and narrative, the narrator vanishes and reappears, disassembles and reassembles herself as a woman for the 21st century. Part feminist, part myth, part artifact, part modern woman, Gimenez Smith's narrator tries to find "the part between parts./ The pause between the verses," pondering "What we did because we had to./ The screen split in two, one side/ light, the other dark." Many of the poems elaborate childhood, womanhood, motherhood, the many pieces from which woman is made. The narrator is resourceful yet ephemeral as a moth, as predictable and fleeting as the moon. These are poems of complexity and clarity, of litany and wishes: "I wish I could find what I need like you find a twenty/ in an old coat. I wish I could unravel it all and start/ it again to redo each first day." VERDICT Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.--Karla Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI
Huston, Karla
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huston, Karla. "Gimenez Smith, Carmen. Odalisque in Pieces." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2009, p.
81. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A210595907 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=be895fd5. Accessed 2 June 2018.
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Milk & Filth
Publishers Weekly.
260.34 (Aug. 26, 2013): p46. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Milk & Filth
Carmen Gimenez Smith. Univ. of Arizona, $15.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-81652116-6
Populated by female figures from Phaedra to Lolita, Baba Yaga to Joan Rivers, a 16th-century female pirate to Guadalupe, Gimenez Smith's fourth collection can feel like showing up to the raucous and deviant afterparty of Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party." While this book's relationship to history, myth, and narrative is destabilized--determined by a speaker whose "I/eye [...] turned out to be the most elusive quality" where "me is a pastiche/of learned gesture"--and while a postmodern sense of irony, pastiche, and comedy are at the heart Gimenez Smith's aesthetics, the poems demand a return to the material, the bodily, to where "scars are radical exposition." With her brazen and mordant voice, Gimenez Smith generously deploys physical--often violent-- imagery to challenge classist, consumerist, and socially polite forms of feminism in the interest of "all the bodies strewn over history and semi-emerging from the earth." Departing from "a feral/undergrowth that marks/me as burial site" Gimenez Smith traverses fable, manifesto, and the lyrical to exhume the familial, cultural, intellectual, and artistic inheritances at work in and on the poet. Frequently invoking the work of And Mendieta, Gimenez Smith also takes the body, takes sex "and put[s] it everywhere," offers "an illegible surge/of leaving trace/of self en route," and engages "audience/and documentation/ from every vista, each atom/ as witness and cohort." (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Milk & Filth." Publishers Weekly, 26 Aug. 2013, p. 46. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A341367139/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=09204668. Accessed 2 June 2018.
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Carmen Gimenez Smith: Bring Down the Little Birds
World Literature Today.
84.6 (November-December 2010): p65. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 University of Oklahoma http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Carmen Giménez Smith Bring Down the Little Birds University of Arizona Press
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Carmen Giménez Smith exlores the myriad reactions and emotions she experiences in relation to both the concept and the reality of motherhood. Ariel Gore describes Bring Down the Little Birds as diving into "all the rich and irritating questions with heart, guts, and humor."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Carmen Gimenez Smith: Bring Down the Little Birds." World Literature Today, vol. 84, no. 6,
2010, p. 65. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A242379640 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7da79a11. Accessed 2 June 2018.
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My Mother She Killed Me, My Father
He Ate Me
Kevin Goldstein
Marvels & Tales.
26.1 (Apr. 2012): p129+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Wayne State University Press http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/MarvelsHome/about.html
Full Text:
My mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. Edited by Kate Bernheimer with Carmen Gimenez Smith. foreword by Gregory McGuire. New York: Penguin, 2010. 608 pp.
Totaling over 600 pages and 40 stories, Kate Bernheimer and Carmen Gimenez Smith's anthology of contemporary folktales, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, displays a wealth of approaches to the form: realist, magical realist, absurdist; first-, second-, and third- person singular and plural; past and present; ahistorical or temporally defined down to the minute; geographically ambiguous or as precise as a rendezvous at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. The editors give their contributors considerable latitude, refusing to rigidly define the genre, or indeed, define it at all. "When asked by some contributors what a fairy tale was," Bernheimer writes in her introduction, "I would answer: You already know. A fairy tale is a story with a fairy-tale feel, I told them. And we'd continue from there" (xxii). I can only assume that this circular definition was intended to assuage the disquiet of writers not entirely familiar with what is apparently more a feeling than a genre. The result is an inevitably uneven collection, which promises many disappointments but happily still more pleasures.
Copious as it is, the volume proves rather insular in its geographic reach. Save for several brief if eventful sojourns to Mexico, Vietnam, and Japan, the stories keep to the bounds of Europe. That is, their origins are provisionally traced back to Europe, although as Bernheimer points out, the countries listed in the table of contents by no means hold exclusive rights to them. For all intents and purposes, the editors have placed the origins of these tales firmly in the subjective experiences of the volume's contributors. The artist's subjectivity is the origin that anchors this book.
Apart from devising one of the more arresting titles on bookshelves today, the editors present a convincing argument for fairy tales as a living tradition in the twenty-first century. As a record of neither a monolithic folk nor anonymous native informants, the stories collected in this anthology are not only signed but in each case augmented by the contributor's postscript. These brief, fascinating addenda typically locate the tale within the author's autobiography; time and again writers describe reading fairy tales as children and, in turn, reading them to their children. In fact, by articulating fairy tales as experiences, the volume becomes less about the writing than the sharing of such stories.
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At once autobiography, literary criticism, and a window into the creative process, these postscripts also help structure a peculiar kind of communication between what are otherwise self- contained entries in an anthology. We begin to see how Hans Christian Andersen's "Wild Swans" affected Michael Cunningham and Karen Joy Fowler in remarkably different ways and, indeed, resulted in two very different variants. Yet the tale remains a common point of reference, a common experience. My Mother She Killed Me is a book that puts the lie to fairy tales as mere escapism, showing that, without our realizing it, these tales have burrowed their way into us.
Although sixteen of the tales were first printed elsewhere, several of them over a decade ago, the volume manages to give the impression of a collective effort. Despite the cacophony of styles in evidence, many writers seem to share a determination to drag the fantastic through the mud of the mundane--a reverse of the journey into a fantastical realm. Often this adds pathos and humor, as when Kevin Brockmeier's character Half of Rumpelstiltskin, working as a store mannequin, is told by his boss to shave because "nobody likes a hairy mannequin" (61), or Michael Cunningham's one-winged prince, who struggles to maneuver into subway trains and taxi cabs. Regrettably, this soon becomes a tired conceit. In Shelley Jackson's version of the "Swan Brothers," the girl without hands (ATU 706) makes an appearance and recounts her ordeal simply as a terrible, yet boring incident.
Nevertheless, a certain joy often emanates from these stories, as though the authors have discovered the enormous freedom afforded by tradition, the freedom to leave much unsaid, to depend on what John Miles Foley calls traditional referentiality. Yet this does not stop many of the authors from engaging in psychological portraits of classic heroes and villains. It is almost as though many of them believe that rewriting fairy tales can only mean creating a character study. This gesture toward psychological depth often undermines the ambiguity and thus the durability of these characters. By forgoing psychological shading, Walter Benjamin argues in his seminal essay "The Storyteller" (1936) that the story gains a stronger hold on the memory of the listener, who is thus more likely to repeat it. All too often in My Mother She Killed Me the stories resemble less new contributions than readerly interventions into the tradition. The authors seek to communicate, but the conversation is one-sided.
The postscripts themselves, fascinating though they are, often resemble self-portraits. Many of the writers wish to share their stories, and their relationship to the great fairy tales that inspired them, but as a means of expressing themselves rather than of contributing to the tradition. Similarly, the myriad examples of irony, novelty, and playful formal experimentation make for a diverting and pleasurable read but wear rather thin on the second read.
All of this being said, I still believe that My Mother She Killed Me represents a powerful argument for the strength of fairy tales as a living tradition. Francine Prose's piece, lacking fantastic elements altogether, nonetheless speaks to the mysterious way we suddenly find ourselves assuming the role of a character like Gretel. Here, and in other notable stories, we find an uncanny reflection of our own lives, engendering an indescribable yet haunting feeling, that "fairy-tale feel." At its best, Kate Bernheimer and Carmen Gimenez Smith's anthology retains the very strangeness and mystery that account for the longevity of fairy tales. It is this absorbing strangeness that will sustain the tradition.
7 of 8 6/2/18, 2:14 PM
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Kevin Goldstein New York University Goldstein, Kevin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Goldstein, Kevin. "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me." Marvels & Tales, vol. 26,
no. 1, 2012, p. 129+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A287751493/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d0db027b. Accessed 2 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A287751493
8 of 8 6/2/18, 2:14 PM
INTERVIEW WITH CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH
Carmen Giménez Smith is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, the publisher of Noemi Press, and the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. Her work has most recently appeared in Mandorla, Colorado Review and Ploughshares and is forthcoming in Jubilat and Denver Quarterly. She is the author of Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), and Glitch (Dusie Press Kollectiv, 2009). She recently edited, with Kate Bernheimer, an anthology of contemporary fairy tale adaptations to be published by Penguin Classics in 2010. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her husband and their two children.
Carmen kindly agreed to juggle yet one more thing and sit down with La Bloga to chat about her new poetry collection, Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona Press, 2009).
DANIEL OLIVAS: How did you decide upon the title of your new collection, Odalisque in Pieces? Did you consider other titles?
CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH: I shuffled through many titles before landing on Odalisque. For a long time the book was called Fussy, which probably had more to do with my personality than it did with the book. It was called Solve For N when I sent it to Arizona; the editors there weren’t crazy about that one, so I ordered my husband to come up with a title; he plucked the phrase from a poem in the book. It seemed perfect to me: a woman naked, supine, slavish, shattered.… I feel that it’s the book’s secret symbol, in a way.
DO: You divide the collection into four sections without titles. Did you intend each section to have a theme?
CGS: I’d like to think that the book has an arc. Each section contains a poem with a sense of mythos about it, and the book tracks a progression into adulthood. Earlier drafts of the book didn’t contain section breaks, but a reader felt that the book needed some moments of pause -- some “breathing room,” I believe she said -- so the section breaks were included to provide something like that. I think the breaks serve to dramatize movement through the book, and also to help ensure that certain significant poems in the book’s project wouldn’t get lost in the melee of a sectionless collection. To be honest, I’m pretty order-illiterate when it comes to my own work. I’ve been lucky to have friends who will step in and say, “This is how you should order this book.” It may be that poem order literacy is a qualification for a poet’s friendship.
DO: One of my favorite poems in your collection is “Tree Tree Tree,” which begins: “There’s a game we play: / Repeating a word until it ceases to mean….” These lines are both thrilling and horrifying, at least for a writer. Do you ever get lost in words? Do their meanings sometime become obscured the more you dwell with them?
CGS: I am enthralled by syntax, by the sinews of the sentence. Often my absorption in the line leads to language becoming pure sound for me, something like murmur, but of course the printed word itself and at least the shadow of its meaning always remain. I love Wittgenstein’s take on this stuff, the way he seems so utterly perplexed by it, which I think is the correct attitude to take when it comes to thinking about the relationship between the look of the word on the page and the sound of the word in your head or your ear. There’s a line somewhere in the Investigations: “Remember that the look of a word is familiar to us in the same kind of way as its sound.” I suppose “Tree Tree Tree” speaks to this look–sound problematic in some way.
My first language was Spanish. Writing in a language other than that with which I grew up, with which I learned to think and feel, has surely had some bearing on my relationship to writing. I love finding words and sounds from other languages buried in English; I prefer to imagine discrete languages as continuous, like adjoining rooms connected by a common door -- sound. When I revise a poem, I’m thinking primarily about sound, syllables as phonemic puzzle pieces. I wrote “Tree Tree Tree” in graduate school; I think it was exhibitive of my coming to this awareness of new sonic possibilities in my writing.
DO: Do you have a favorite poem in this collection?
CGS: I have specific, special feelings for each of the poems. The poem “Finding the Lark” took me years and years to write, so I certainly have very strong feelings for that one: something like half ardor, half arduousness. I would write a draft with a truncated ending, and my good friend, one of my best readers, the poet Mark Wunderlich, would hand it back to me and say, “No.” When I started writing the poem, I didn’t have the chops to sustain the drama, the narrative. I have often seen the necessary course of a poem early on, but have failed to come up with the stamina, I guess, to follow it through all the way to the end. But this is something I’m failing better at all the time.
If I had to choose one poem that’s just my out-and-out favorite, I would probably pick “Idea In a Ruinous State,” the book’s final poem. I’m nuts about Wallace Stevens; early drafts of the poem contained a refrain that included his name. Mark said, “No.” I went back to the drawing board. I remember an interim draft that was significantly more expansive. Eventually I stripped it down into something like a litany, which turned out to be the solution to that particular poem.
As you can tell, my fondness for my own poems concerns the process by which they came to be. Revising and reshaping and reconceiving a poem: that is why I love to write poetry.
DO: Who are some of your favorite poets and how have they influenced your poetry?
CGS: Well, like I said, Stevens is pretty much the cat’s pajamas for me. When I was in graduate school I hated him; I didn’t see how earnest his work was until I was older. My favorites list is long and eclectic. My dear friend Rosa Alcalá’s work poetry has had a strong influence on my newer work. Her stuff is so nervy and tough; I love it, I love it, I love it. There’s Mina Loy, sort of modern dance. And James Wright, wow. Wright’s work has been a big force in my life. He’s tough too, but also so lyric. I like Neruda’s wryness. There’s Louise Glück, so terse, the master of compression. Brenda Shaughnessy is so lush, and her beautifully complex syntax. C.D. Wright is great. Juan Felipe Herrera is the sage. Alexander Pope is so funny. Mary Jo Bang has such amazing range. I work with two incredible poets, Connie Voisine and Richard Greenfield; I’ve learned a great deal from them. They’re very different, but both rare talents. Mark Wunderlich is one of the great lyric poets of our time; I’ve learned so much from him. Some contemporary poets with whom I’m in the early stages of romance are Ariana Reines, Paige Ackerson Kiely, Hoa Nguyen, Peter Ramos and Dan Machlin.
DO: Do you have a writing routine? How do you juggle writing with teaching and editing?
CGS: I drop a lot of balls when I juggle…. I have an amazing husband who helps and supports me. I’m blessed with so many generous friends and colleagues.
Once I became a mother, I had to become mercenary with my time. I can’t wait around for a poem to strike me, so instead I create goofy scenarios in my mind from which poems might emerge. I have lots of these little multiparous tricks to generate drafts. As soon as my kids are in bed, I write. I also do a lot of composition in my head while I’m doing any number of mundane things, folding laundry, cleaning dishes, etc. I don’t necessarily write a poem from memory, but I certainly can imagine a form or an arc, maybe the beginning of a lexicon, then scramble to write it down.
Teaching only fuels my writing. I get so inspired by my students; I often walk away from class jonesing to write. And the work I do as an editor informs my work, as well. I’ve learned a lot about my own writing from working with authors on their manuscripts. Being an editor and a teacher requires me to quickly and clearly articulate what is at issue in a piece of writing. Surely this has been helpful to my own revision process.
DO: Are you working on another book?
CGS: I just finished a manuscript of poems called (for now, at least) Trees Outside the Academy, as well as another collection called Happy Trigger, a book I’m terribly excited about because it’s my feminist polemic, the book I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I’ve also written a nonfiction book, Bring Down the Little Birds, which the University of Arizona Press will release next year. I’ve been working with Kate Bernheimer -- from whom I’ve learned so much -- on an anthology of contemporary writers adapting fairy tales, for publication with Penguin. I’ve been writing short pieces for a book about money and class called Squander and also beginning again to think about a book I’ve been working on for what feels like eternity, something called Goodbye Flicker about a girl who escapes into these fairy tales which her mother has, in the telling, corrupted. I always have to have several projects going on at a time. So many windows open on the computer, crazy stacks of papers around me, books all over the place. It helps me to flit about from thing to thing.
DO: Mil gracias for spending time with La Bloga.
◙ The latest volume of The Los Angeles Review is now out and available for purchase. Published by Red Hen Press and edited by Kate Gale, this issue is dedicated to Wanda Coleman and includes essays, fiction and poetry from many fine writers including a nice sampling of Latinos/as such as Conrad Romo, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Chloe Joan Lopez, Octavio Quintanilla, and Eugenia Toledo. I’m delighted to note that the issue also includes an interview by fiction editor, Stefanie Freele, of yours truly concerning Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press, 2008). I do want to note that Stefanie is the author of a powerful, funny and not-to-be-missed short story collection, Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press, 2009).
◙ Gregg Barrios interviews playwright Octavio Solis for the San Antonio Current. Barrios notes that “Solis’s breakthrough drama, Lydia, has made the El Paso-born playwright a national sensation in the theater world. But for the 50-year-old Solis, who has toiled in the theatrical trenches for half his lifetime, the idea of overnight success chafes a bit. He’d prefer to be described as an 'up-and-coming' playwright.” It’s an enlightening interview which you may read in its entirety here. Also, don’t miss Barrios’s tribute to the Crystal City, Texas Student Walkout 1969...this month marks its 40th anniversary.
◙ Lisa Alvarado is a poet, performer, and installation artist, focusing on identity, spirit, and the body. She is the founder of La Onda Negra Press, and is author of Reclamo and The Housekeeper’s Diary, originally a book of poetry and now a one-woman performance, and is the recipient of grants from the Department of Cultural Affairs, The NEA, and the Ragdale Foundation. Lisa has also completed an ambitious trilogy of performance pieces, REM/Memory, Bury The Bones and Resurgam, whose themes are the culture of violence, popular culture and personal redemption. Her first novel, Sister Chicas (written with Ann Hagman Cardinal and Jane Alberdeston) was bought by Penguin/NAL, and released in April 2006. Her book of poetry, Raw Silk Suture, was released by Floricanto Press in 2008. We have a treat: a poem by Lisa Alvarado in celebration of Chanukah. Enjoy:
Adonai assigns each Jew a rabbi or tzadik
because you can't eat yeshiva or angel's wings,
Even the holy need parnassa, and a job is a job, after all.
But we still were hiding
so my great grandmother, a woman, a bird at the end of flight,
was my first rabbi, my first tzadik.
Us two, with eight more in Gan Eden.
No one else allowed, no one knowing.
Because the neighbors already looked at us with sharpened eyes,
sharp as the knife she killed chickens with for Fridays.
The two of us, the ten of us,
burned that bread, lit those lights
and sang down the slipping night
and Shekinah's stars.
I am her patchwork Jew,
offering poor wages
to those rabbis close now.
No drush is as sweet as the honey from her table.
◙ Read Queer is Multicultural, and essay by Himilce Novas in The MultiCultural Review.
◙ If you’re still looking for that perfect gift, check out Marcela Landres’s suggested Latino/a titles.
◙ Rigoberto González, an award-winning writer living in New York City, reviews for My Latino Voice the new novel by Reyna Grande, Dancing with Butterflies (Simon & Schuster). He notes, in part:
“The landscape of the novel is genuinely contemporary, so the tensions between alien status and national identity, between prescribed gender roles and feminism, are key factors in the motivations and attitudes prevalent in the behaviors of the characters. But Grande is successful in keeping the women from becoming symbols or victims of the violence and struggles of international and domestic politics.”
You may read the entire review here.
◙ That’s all for now. I hope that you and yours will be healthy and happy this holiday season. In the meantime, enjoy the intervening posts from mis compadres y comadres here on La Bloga. And remember: ¡Lea un libro!
Posted by Daniel A. Olivas at 12:01 AM
Quoted in Sidelights: “The arsenal of poetic devices that Gimenez-Smith unleashes within the book includes a wit that is razor sharp while maintaining a sense of self-deprecation, lines that are syntactically complex and heightened by assonance and dissonance while an innate sense of music propels the reader down the page,” remarked Volta Blog reviewer Caitlin Ferguson. Gimenez Smith,” she said, “produces a feminist manifesto without losing the ability to remind the reader of our humanness.”
Carmen Gimenez-Smith’s Milk and Filth
milk & filth coverI received Carmen Gimenez-Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Milk and Filth, now out from the University of Arizona’s Comino del Sol series, at the beginning of Fall last year and it quickly became my constant companion through a multitude of train and subway rides. During the many miles I traveled with this book, I fell in love with the raw, scabbiness of the author’s words and how they boldly oscillated from surreal beauty, not unlike a Dali painting, to the messy and the bodily. The richness of her lines and her ability to draw from a vast array of references ranging from the Virgin of Guadalupe to Joan Rivers requires the reader to understand and ruminate upon each line in relation to the poem, as well as how each line of each poem interacts with the book as a whole. Each time I revisited and reread Gimenez-Smith’s fierce and unapologetic creation of a collective voice, it became more and more apparent that she has crafted a scathing social critique of gender roles and a personal manifesto that is ineffably feminist in nature.
Throughout the collection, the arsenal of poetic devices that Gimenez-Smith unleashes within the book includes a wit that is razor sharp while maintaining a sense of self-deprecation, lines that are syntactically complex and heightened by assonance and dissonance while an innate sense of music propels the reader down the page, and a postmodern usage of irony and pastiche. Arranged in three sections that stack and expand upon each other, the first, entitled Gender Fables, creates the collective voice while destabilizing the feminine narrative; the second, Small Deaths, explores the self in relation to rejected societal norms and feminism while maintaining more of a confessional variant; and the third, Beginnings, containing just two poems, one of which is an eight part sequence poem, is the shortest section and attempts to establish a new narrative.
Gimenez-Smith steals stories from history, myth, folk-lore, and pop-culture, among other sources, and redefines them in order to interrogate the preconceptions of gender and the feminine. In the poem “(Baba Yaga,)” named after a Slavic folk-tale which tells a story of a deformed and ferocious elderly witch, Gimenez-Smith writes:
Because she’s better suited for unsolvable
Old World type villainy, I venerate/her in a story. (22)
The subversion of the historical notions of the feminine narrative forces the reader to view gender identity through a different lens. This idea of venerating known female figures that have been distorted into a negative representation by societal norms is at the heart of her book and she does not hesitate in attacking the biases that are the product of social stereotyping. While the speakers work at destabilizing the learned narratives, the images turn toward the material, the bodily, which are often fraught with violence and the grotesque, and thereby continue the delineation away from the more socially polite forms of feminism that are also being questioned throughout the book. For example, take this passage from “(Fragments from the Confessions)”:
Decoupage the jar with mouths
cut from Cosmo, mister death,
fill it with our menstrual blood
or the placenta from our collective lacunae. (8)
By using images such as menstrual blood and the placenta, which are inherently feminine and bodily, to desecrate a jug that tends to represent both civilization and domesticity, Gimenez-Smith brings the reader back to the root of the feminine, a separate and complete entity. She uses this return to the elemental, to the natural and purely feminine, to exhume the self in the face of the intellectual, the artistic, and the familial forces at play. Thus, the combination of the grotesque image of child-birth with the natural and superficial in the ending lines of “Labor Day”:
From closed bud
to gaping, dying rose, petal by petal.
Layers of pearl built around a granule
of waste, the diamond ring clanging
in the pipes, the plunge of meconium
and blood, I shat and bled. (53)
The combination of the natural with the profane and grotesque as well as the natural with the manufactured is a dichotomy repeated throughout the book and mirrors the exploration of gender roles. Just as feminism and the feminist narrative falls into these roles, Gimenez-Smith also uses this juxtaposition to mirror the self in relation to society and social norms.
Once she has reduced the existing infrastructure to ruins, she rebuilds and creates a new narrative. Consequently, in the last poem in the collection, “When God was a Woman,” there is a notable change in the diction as it switches to a lighter sonic pattern and, in conversation with the proceeding pieces, the woman, the heroine, is venerated.
If nothing else, I implore you to pick up this collection for yourself so you can see exactly how Gimenez-Smith produces a feminist manifesto without losing the ability to remind the reader of our humanness:
You’d like to downgrade
into human. Then what? Amorality, osteoporosis
and not even a marble estuary for the ages. (15)
Buy if from the Comino del Sol series, University of Arizona Press: $16
Caitlin Ferguson is in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark
Written by cbwithwith Posted in Uncategorized
Quoted in Sidelights: “the intriguing complexity of Giménez Smith’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek commentary of femininity and even feminism,” adding that she brings “a fresh energy into the discourse of sex and sexuality.”
30 books 2013: Rigoberto González on Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk & Filth
by Rigoberto González | Jan-22-2014
In the weeks leading up to the March 13 announcement of the 2013 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights the thirty finalists. Today, in the first in our series, NBCC board member Rigoberto González offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Milk & Filth (University of Arizona Press) by Carmen Giménez Smith.
Carmen Giménez Smith has developed a thought-provoking relationship with gender and fables, particularly with her previous two works, Goodbye, Flicker and Milk & Filth. The latter book surprises readers with its provocative double-edged strategy: not only does she call into question the male-authored narratives with female protagonists, she also asks that women examine closely the re-imagined female protagonists: Is that truly how women see themselves?
With poems that take structural and linguistic risks, that reconfigure old tropes and elude linear narrative, Giménez Smith invites Shakespeare’s Juliet, Nabokov’s Lolita and other fictions of male fantasy onto the political platform, where she deftly deconstructs, reconstructs, and then duly critiques her own creations. Therein the intriguing complexity of Giménez Smith’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek commentary of femininity and even feminism--particularly second-wave feminism, which is troubled by the participation of Giménez Smith’s most recent muses: La Malinche, La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, Ana Mendieta, and a third-wave feminist speaker: “Feminism tried to accommodate me inside of its confines when I was a polygon.”
Milk & Filth reads like the radicalization of the poetry of gender politics--at once assertive and suggestive--infusing a fresh energy into the discourse of sex and sexuality, defiant and resistant to the academic platitudes of yesterday:
We’re figures. We’re lists of expenditures and food diaries,
but today I held the middle of me in hand and shook it.
It shook, shook like something fun.
More:
Interview on Letras Latinas.
From Santa Fe Reporter.
Critical Mass, Small Press Spotlight.
Reading at Saint Vincent College on YouTube.
Rigoberto González, author of eight books and recipient of both Guggenheim and NEA grants, reviews for the El Paso Times twice a month and is currently teaching at the MFA writing program of Rutgers—Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
Quoted iu Sidelights: “The rhetoric of social justice for feminism and for civil rights often evoke the very real struggles of its subjects, and rather than feel shame for wanting to enact what happens to my body and feel obliged to abstract it for aesthetic currency, I’d like to return to the very essential idea of body,”
Interview Questions for Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk & Filth
“I tried to buy a drink, but the steward
told me I was too wasted on hubris.”
--Carmen Giménez Smith
Cover artist: Evan Lavender Smith
1. In “Malinché,” I found the last stanza interesting in its exploration of language as a power tool on one hand, while divine on the other.
She tells them she plans to inter our dialect
into theirs, our divinity. She wants mongrel dictions
to add to her arsenal. She wants to be lord.
Is there a correlation between the two? If yes, how so? What do “our divinity” and “her arsenal” mean?
My sense of how Malinche would have interred dialect into “theirs,” refers to the “creolization” that takes place when the New World and Old World tangle. I refer to the mongrel dictions that are born from that engagement in the next sentence. I think I’m making the most basic proposition about power when I use the word “aresenal.” Through her engagement with the New World, as problematic as it is read historically, she is given a position of power and negotiation. She also becomes a shaper of discourse.
2. For poems, such as “The Red Lady,” you included note references in the back. Can you tell us a bit about the process involved in transforming such historical figures? Were these inspirational figures, muses, or did you want to reconstruct/re-imagine their narratives? Can you tell us more about the dedications in the notes to Roberto Harrison and J. Michael Martinez?
I wrote a lot of poems that didn’t end up in the collection, but I think I tended towards maligned or problematic female icons or figures, those that are hard to locate in the old virgin/whore binary, and I really tried to inhabit their consciousness within a second wave feminist context, and evoke the rhetorical power of persona in each poem.
I spent a week at Ragdale in a special fellowship arranged by Letras Latinas called Ocho Poetas. Poets who also worked as editors came together to talk about the state of Latin@ publishing, and we had a lot of time to walk around the beautiful grounds and talk poetry. My dedication notes to JMM and RH are based on many of the conversations and collaborations we did during that time.
3. Speaking of muses, the line “Please note how much it costs/ to be muse” in the poem “And the Mouth Lies Open” caught my interest, in addition to “I pay for affirmation/ from a woman in a white noise office who/ guides me through behavior modification/ and trauma, yet I’m still only a morsel/ of authority…”
In thinking about the figures of la Malinché, la Llorona, Lolita, I think of tragic figures whose lives seem to center on trauma. Is this an idea you explore or reject? Do you see parallels between these figures and the “I” in the book, such as in “Parts of an Autobiography?
52. That childhood is why I am a poet. I planned to chronicle it. I planned
to make it cautionary and gut.
Absolutely. The main visual context I have for this book is Ana Mendieta’s distorted and “traumatized” body. The female body is a loci of many wars, cultural and political, so I wanted to reach into the legacy behind these “traumas,” traumas which really concern borders that are often breached or violated through the female body. My body and my children’s bodies (because of our indigenous roots) are likely a few generations away from both public and private degradations. I also wanted to reclaim and celebrate the power of lyric subjectivity as a political tool. The persona is a mask, a performance whose rhetorical aim is to garner connection.
4. In “Epiphany at La Cueva,” you open with the striking image:
Soaring like a startled flock
out of the shelter of trees,
I felt what mother earth was about:
Can you tell us more about this poem? Is La Cueva referring to a specific place whether real or imaginary?
La Cueva is a real place in Northern New Mexico. I was hiking with my family and my friend, Dylan, and although I rarely write about the natural world, I thought about the female moniker, Mother Nature and how it is a particularly stark and ruthless place.
5. One of my favorite poems, “Queenly,” made me think of the title of the book and notice the book cover. I found the superimposition of the name across the woman’s face, and the words “Milk” and “Filth” across her breasts and vagina an interesting message ironically evoking the mother/whore complex. Can you tell us more about the cover art design and the woman on the cover?
My husband designed the book, and again, I wanted to give it a 70s feel, like a book published by a small, radical feminist press. I also wanted to pay visual homage to the work of Ana Mendieta, as well as many other feminist visual artists who use their own body in their work. The book’s title was Rosa Alcalá’s idea, and it was so perfectly suiting to the book’s ethos, and so those two ambitions came together and the visual rhetoric of the design was a thrilling result. The woman is me, the only nude picture we had when we were designing the book. The photo is nearly ten years old, and it was taken when I was a few months pregnant with my son.
6. In “Parts of an Autobiography” what significance does the number thirteen hold in the stanza:
6. In college I was groomed to overthrow patriarchy by the capri-panted
rebel who introduced me to Our Bodies, Ourselves in my first women’s
studies class who taught us about the number thirteen and the Venus of
Willendorf. This was in the late 80’s and early 90’s.
In college I learned that one reason thirteen might be seen as malevolent was because women have 13 moon cycles in a year.
7. This idea of being “groomed” to overthrow patriarchy makes me think of the differences between first world and third world feminism and how they vary. Can you tell us more about the use of the word “groomed” in the context of the stanza above or otherwise?
When I was in college it seemed completely normal for a teacher to attempt to radicalize her students, especially when it came to feminism. Although the academy is seen as this great liberal indoctrination machine, it’s actually quite difficult to talk about ideas because one has to be cautious of being read as radical (which used to not be such a bad word). I also felt that I was being given tools to change the world for women.
8. # 35 in “Parts of an Autobiography” reads:
35. I write a poem in which I reveal my true feelings. The body is the
engine and the brain is the hindrance.
In what way is the brain a hindrance? Stanza # 61:
61. I am not averse to working on myself in my art.
Made me think of cognitive reprocessing through writing. What did you mean by working on myself in my art?
In both cases, I’m probably arguing for the radical value of the lyric, the dense interior space that it evokes and how transformative it can be in relation to social justice. The rhetoric of social justice for feminism and for civil rights often evoke the very real struggles of its subjects, and rather than feel shame for wanting to enact what happens to my body and feel obliged to abstract it for aesthetic currency, I’d like to return to the very essential idea of body. Experience is synthesized firstly through the body. The mind then does what it does, but I wanted to go back to what brought me to poetry in the first place, in those days when I knew and understood how I could be a part of change. The female body, mutilated by machetes, raped by colonists, penetrated by transvaginal ultrasound wands, etc.—those are the sources of my urgency, those are bodies. Again, I point to visual artists like Ana Mendieta, Nan Goldin, Yayoi Kusama, Hannah Wilke, Kiki Smith, and others who use viscerality as a source.
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections— Gender Fables, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. She teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
* * *
Publisher’s link: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2443.htm
Latino Lens: Feminist Poet Draws Praise for New Book
Mar.13.2014 / 7:14 PM ET
Latina poet, essayist and professor Carmen Gimenez Smith.
Latina poet, essayist and professor Carmen Gimenez Smith. Evan Lavender-Smith / Photo credit: Evan Lavender-Smith
Poet and essayist Carmen Giménez Smith knew she wanted to be writer at a very early age.
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“I was a big bookworm,” she says. “I would get books at thrift stores and garage sales. I'd just read anything I could get my hands on. I loved it, and I loved the world that it created. And I said, 'I want to do that. I want to create these worlds.'”
These "worlds" she has created have clearly resonated with readers and critics; Giménez Smith's latest book, Milk and Filth, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the Poetry category.
“That day was like I was walking on air,” of the day when she found out she was a finalist.
Giménez Smith is the daughter of South American immigrants. Her mother, who is Peruvian, and her father, who is Argentinean, both worked in the hospitality industry for most of her childhood. She was born in New York and then moved 13 times around the country when she was growing up.
Giménez Smith attributes these migrations to her “father's rising and complex relationship to status in this country. We kind of had to go where the fortunes took us.”
So often being the new girl made her feel like an outsider, and books became a haven. “I was familiar with difference anyway, having moved so much. I was always the odd person in the room. I spent a lot of time alone and I have a very complex interior life. I already sort of knew that I was different.”
It was in high school that she became interested in poetry. One of her teachers, who was a contemporary of the Beat poets, introduced her to the work of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. She was also profoundly influenced by William Blake and Sylvia Plath.
“I always knew that I was a feminist, and I kind of always knew that I was a writer of color, but I didn't know what that meant. And I'm still continuing to unpack what that means.”
Though she desperately wanted to be a fiction writer, Giménez Smith realized she had a natural instinct for poetry. “I like that it's more plastic than prose. Fiction requires so many layers of infrastructure, which I find less interesting than language,” she says.
In college, one of her professors, a Lebanese American writer, exposed her to writers of color.
“It was a real paradigm shift for me to think about identity and it became a big part of my writing,” she says. “I always knew that I was a feminist, and I kind of always knew that I was a writer of color, but I didn't know what that meant. And I'm still continuing to unpack what that means.”
Her book "Milk and Filth" examines issues of gender and race with vibrant language and bizarre and astonishing imagery. On race, Giménez Smith says the issue "has been put at the forefront because we have a black president and we can't pretend that's not the case."
On gender, she wanted a book more "explicit in its feminism." Part of the impetus, she explains, was a result of becoming older and getting more involved with VIDA, an organization which examines the perceptions of writing by women.
“Seeing the way female students navigate the world, having a daughter and having all of those things converge, it made me realize I'm still pretty pissed off and there's a lot of work to be done. I felt like I wanted to do something aggressive. That's the word that comes to mind,” says Giménez Smith, who is an assistant professor at New Mexico State University.
"Milk & Filth" is the latest poetry book by author Carmen Gimenez Smith.
"Milk & Filth" is the latest poetry book by author Carmen Gimenez Smith.
Her book is a tribute to feminist artists such as the late Cuban American performance artist and sculptor Ana Mendieta and Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldua, who wrote about her experiences on the Texas-Mexico border in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
These artists, as well as the feminist poetry anthology No More Masks, explicitly politicized their work. “That's exactly what I wanted the book to do."
As a woman and writer of color, she says she is elated her book was recognized among the best poetry books of this past year.
“I'm so proud. I'm so happy. I think it's amazing that the NBCC speaks to the diversity of how they're reading, because this is a Latina feminist book. I kind of can't believe it.”
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Review: Carmen Giménez Smith’s Goodbye, Flicker
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See Carmen Gimenez Smith Read Her Work:
27 September 2012 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM Sandy Spring Bank Tent George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA
I was introduced to the work of Carmen Giménez Smith by friend and poet Molly Gaudry over at The Lit Pub, for which I am very grateful. Giménez Smith is the author of 3 collections of poetry, as well as a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds. She is the publisher of Noemi Press, editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and an assistant professor in the MFA program at New Mexico State University. I am thrilled that So to Speak will be hosting her for a reading during GMU’s Fall for the Book Festival this year on Thursday, 9/27, at noon.
I recently read Giménez Smith’s most recent book of poems, Goodbye, Flicker, winner of the Juniper Prize in Poetry, and was immediately drawn in by the book’s imaginative scenario: a girl escapes into her dreams. As with all good dreams, the girl’s movement in and out of the dreams and characters like Owl Girl is always at stake; the dreams reel from the absurd to the realistic, creating a surreal world in which people may dissolve at will or split in two. Within them, Giménez Smith also pushes on the boundaries of language, condensing her lines too tightly for articles and considering issues of translation. Her poems contain both the lyric and the narrative, bound by abrupt turns that require the confidence of a fairy-tale listener: anything can happen. For instance, she writes in “Thorny”:
A release of birds signals a grand mal
of fireworks because the prince
has come and touched my face.
Face: I mean mask.
Giménez Smith sets the first section of the book as a “pushpull,” a descriptor which could accurately be applied to the tension which she creates throughout the entire collection. She alludes to texts as diverse as the work of Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm, and José Marmol, all the while involving the reader in a struggle with the nature of storytelling and modes of transmission. For example, anachronisms appear present from the blurring of dream and reality, and the use of persona draws our attention to reinterpretations of archetypes, like the figure of the prince as a deadbeat dad. The poem “The Tales She Wrote” evokes a number of such possibilities with a list of the girl’s works, like “Bugs Bunny Kisses the Saint Mary” and “Interior Paint Troll and the Bridge of Unemployment.” This mixing can also be painful, though, as when Bluebeard invites Owl Girl to his home, then serves “voodoo potion” to his guest. The reader observes the rape from a distance, with the poet, through a shadow: “a Punch and Judy fracas etched of clattering hips…/A sickening torque in her narrative, the theft of her late.” These observations of power and the conservative values of fairy tales remind me in many ways of Sexton’s Transformations-era work (see Alicia Ostriker’s excellent article on this, “That Story: Anne Sexton and Her Transformations” from The American Poetry Review).
The poet presents interesting questions about the motivations for lore, as well. The book is often invested in resistance, whether through pointing out the actions of the father whose stories define the girl’s identity or giving voice to the mother whose lore is tied into her occupational experience. In “The Beast,” she writes:
The father told it so good
I wanted to carry the edges
of his robe, he and I.
We ruminated over thick books on
psychology and Japan and Marxism,
made his opinion aphorism,
turned personal affronts
into scripture, got derailed by visions
of golden paved roads
told just like I needed.
He invented my girlhood
and all
subsequent versions.
With this poem, Giménez Smith highlights the ways in which the kind of allusions her poetry engages in can be used, in fact, as a tool of external definition, placing the speaker as part of a canon formed by others. However, the observant girl notes that her mother offers her a fairy-tale, “sweet’n low packet of mothers” in exchange for her own presence when “the tick/ mark is too urgent.” When the mother speaks, she responds to Owl Girl’s shame about her mother’s work by connecting her to an oral myth that upends the expected hierarchy:
that entire cities really got managed
by cleaning ladies coming in night after night
to correct executive mishap in the moonlight.
Giménez Smith often offers us this kind of sly social commentary, or varies the tone to a more pressing entreaty: “unhand me from certain doom at the hands of my educators.”
Through the girl’s navigation of these different systems of narrative and experience, the book centers on acts of self-definition and location. It is an act of independence for the girl to declare herself a fairy-tale character, and we witness the speaker in moments of re-imagining the self:
I’m
natasha on a black horse in the forest’s
cloak. purple-brocade saddle.
The book also places the girl in dialogue with the process of creating a new self: acting or engaged in a Q&A with “the sliver poet.” Within the framework of the tales, we witness the girl increasingly taking on poignant decisions:
natasha has a choice. boy or liberty.
he always cries when she chooses the horse.
By inviting readers to observe these magical reinventions of myth, Goodbye, Flicker considers myth, memory, stories, and family from surprising angles. As a reader, I feel privileged to observe the moments when these perspectives allow the speaker to move from the existing narratives to the creation of her own:
I’m torch for the kelp,
for seagulls, for the one ancient
with hair who felt my legs
as a favor, he said. I don’t settle
for voiceless.
Small Press Spotlight: Carmen Giménez Smith
by Rigoberto Gonzalez | May-31-2012
Goodbye, Flicker, University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
Carmen Giménez Smith is the publisher of Noemi Press, the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at New Mexico State University. She is the author of two previous collections--Odalisque in Pieces and The City She Was--and a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds.
“The words slip in and out like/ the Wolf’s tongue in Red’s ear.”: the final lines in the second poem of the collection direct the reader to an understanding of the fairy tale as a metaphor for sexuality and imagination. You draw from a number of sources--Giambattista Basile, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and others--to examine the female as a figure of ingenuity and agency, not as the damsel in distress she was later turned into by Disney and other contemporary story adaptations. Her power is language (“I don’t settle/ for voiceless.”). Can you speak to your particular affinity to the fairy tale? Thought these tales have endured centuries, why is it important to revisit them in 2012?
I’ve always loved the world of fairy tales; when I was young I inhabited them as fully as the speaker of these poems. I’ve always been intrigued by the way we relay lasting cultural and social mores and anxieties through contemporary forms like fairy tales (and television shows). Fairy tales are encoded with compelling messages about gender and class, and I think it’s important to revisit them, to revise them in order to participate in the important ongoing transformation of these stories. Fairy tales and folktales require our intrusions and adaptations because they’re our mirrors. When I teach these stories, I work hard to undo the calcification Disney adaptations have inflicted on these stories. Although each version is important, there’s no definitive version of a fairy tale--they’re open source--and it’s important that we imprint them with the exigencies of our moment, our contemporary ambitions.
A few of the poems offer completely different “readings” just by a simple shift of point of view. In “Half-House,” for example, the Hansel and Gretel witch declares: “Children are just conceit./ My isolation, now there’s a theme”; and in “To Become an Exemplary Girl,” the Pinocchio plight (“I got wrapped in puppetry string” and “trapped inside and waiting/ for the giant yawn/ to release me.”) now holds more dramatic and gendered overtones because we imagine the speaker is a girl. I must note however that none of these fairy tale figures are mentioned by name--they are alluded to. Which begs the question, how do you decide what is familiar enough to the reader to place a re-imagined version next to its “original” telling? And does it matter if a reader can’t place the tale (because they are the poet’s own inventions) or is unable to identify a more obscure fairy tale at all?
That’s one of the challenges of persona poems and also of having references to lesser-known stories. I tried to cultivate a more lyric sensibility in those poems--the compression, the singular voice--and I hope that helps readers hear the speaker out of the story, especially since much of what is expressed is more about subjectivity than it is about plot.
Can you speak to the title of the collection? Or are you leaving it up to the reader to extrapolate on the word “flicker” in particular?
One of the early titles of the book was The Screen, as I imagined the young speaker entering into the world like it’s a television screen. In the poem “Backstory,” she disappears, figuratively, into an interior world, and I thought that the closest approximation to what I felt was the departure into story, into imagination. I am curious to hear how people read the title, and I’ve heard some fascinating versions.
Your first collection was published in 2009, (the memoir in 2010), the second in 2011, this third one is 2012. And I recently read somewhere that you have a fourth collection (Be Recorder) that was a finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press this year. Is there a method to your productivity and in navigating different poetry books at once? How do you keep the projects separate or is there another way you usher certain poems toward certain books?
I started working on Goodbye, Flicker about eleven years ago, and it’s always been in the background. It was only recently that I felt I knew how to finish the book, and I made myself return to it and work on it despite having a lot of doubts about writing a book of linked poems with multiple speakers. I wanted to preserve the ambition, so I worked on it incrementally. When I write prose, I do a lot of “showing up,” what prose writers do--writing even when it feels like torture--and that ethic was vital to getting this book done, sitting down to write new poems even when I didn’t have ideas, desire, or energy.
I work on different books at the same time in order to keep myself writing without pause. What seems like a succession of productivity, though, is actually more a reflection of the vagaries of publishing. I was “finished” with my first book for a long time before it came out (although the press’s reviewers were key in getting the book in great shape for publication). I wrote the memoir in 2005-2006, and I started writing many of the poems that were in The City She Was in 2009, the year my first book came out.
I’ve found that conceptualizing a book helps me determine what kind of poems to write for it, and I literally write into the book after a certain stage, that is, I try and see what sorts of moves are possible in the book, and I write new poems in that direction. I do hammer out a draft of the book fairly intensely, then the bulk of the work is revision. Every time I work on a manuscript, I read it all the way through to enter the sensibility before I do anything. I love revising--I could do it all day long--so I try to hammer out first drafts fairly quickly, and I work and work on them so that they fit the book and work on their own terms.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Carmen Giménez Smith
By The Rumpus Book Club
June 6th, 2012
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Carmen Giménez Smith about her poetry collection Goodbye, Flicker.
This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion with Carmen Giménez Smith. Every month The Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts a discussion online with the club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To become a member of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club click here.
This Rumpus Poetry Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.
***
Brian S: So I have a quick story about how I chose this book, and then we can get to the questions. Carmen sent me this manuscript months ago, and it sat next to my desk for a long time until one night I had the house to myself. And I picked it up, sat at the dining room table, and looked at the title, but instead of “Goodbye, Flicker” I saw “Goodbye, Fucker,” because the title was all in caps and the LI looked like a U to my bad eyes.
And then I read the whole thing in one sitting.
And I decided about 3/4 of the way through that I wanted to do it for the book club, even if the title wasn’t “Goodbye, Fucker.” Because I get a bit of that attitude in the book anyway. Okay, a lot of that attitude.
Carmen: I thought it might get misread that way. I’m glad the misreading served the book!
Brian S: So does anyone else have a question before I jump in?
Gaby: I would actually like to talk about the first poem. And the impulse of storytelling. We spoke to Meghan O’Rourke here who also started her book with a kind of invitation to and refutation of the traditional notion of story/fairytale. I’m wondering if you can talk about this remarkable first poem and the challenges it sets out for us in this remarkable journey of a book?
Brian S: And the book returned to those themes again and again. It was fun picking out the various ways you worked them in.
Carmen: Because the book borrows so freely from fairy tales and because there are so many overlaps in the way fairy tales work, I wanted to evoke what I thought were the plot and character categories the book would most often engage from a wide range of tales. I also wanted the overlap to register maybe like sampling.
Gaby: I love that idea and that term.
Carmen: So I wrote the poem thinking “beginning, beginning, beginning” and “middle middle middle,” and wrote down all types of beginnings and middles (and ends) that resonate in tales for me, then layered them.
Brian S: So much work today seems to sample and mash together. It’s really good to see it done well. Is this the effect that DJs have had on poetry, you think?
Carmen: It’s definitely the effect deejays have had on me.
Gaby: I think it’s a really important way of thinking about poems that are being written right now.
Thelma: I love that the word ‘flicker’ can be read as either noun or verb. Can you tell us a little bit about the title and why you chose it?
Carmen: I’ve had time to recall what that title means because recently someone asked me. The book has had two other titles before: PIETY and THE SCREEN
Thelma: Wow, so different. I like this title.
Carmen: The screen referred to the portal the character enters her stories through, like a television screen. So Goodbye, Flicker refers to the flicker of a television or a screen going on or off.
Another kind of sampling: channel surfing, fairy tale surfing. Until she lands on one that fits her mood.
Gaby: And fairy tales themselves are often sampled text… a wonderful game of telephone through generations and regions
Brian S: Absolutely—sometimes there are so few elements from the original that you can barely tell what the original story was, like a five second loop of a song you know you know but can’t place because it’s out of context.
Thelma: Yes, like she did with the bit of Joni Mitchell.
Thelma: There’s also a bird called a flicker and since birds figure in the book, I wondered if that was a resonance.
Brian S: So are Owl Girl and Natasha and Sliver Poet the same person?
Thelma: Good Q, Brian—I wondered that too.
Carmen: They are, in many ways. I imagined them being different aspects of her fantasy life, but someone pointed out that there was an ego, superego, and id aspect to it. Owl Girl is the primary subjectivity. Natasha is the character she becomes in her escape. Sliver Poet is the meta-.
I didn’t know there was a bird named a flicker, though it makes sense.
Thelma: Great word, though, in any case.
Katrina: I’m really interested in the gendered nature of tales, and the POV.
Gaby: Oh me too! More on that, please!
Brian S: That’s where I was going too, Katrina! I taught Barbara Jane Reyes’s Diwata this year in my class and I thought about that when reading your book Carmen—the way you give voice to characters whose voices have traditionally been limited at least.
Carmen: The book alludes to the mother telling and reforming stories to tell the daughter, and this was true of my experience. My mom was a serious adapter. She would go for laughs, but she also tended to highlight the interesting gender issues raised by fairy tales. I think of fairy tales as fairly homosocial too, their lineage and their transmission, so they do seem to me, an interesting place to consider gender. I’m a bit of a gender-gazer, meaning, I’m constantly thinking about gender and how it’s constructed and stories are super-important.
Thelma: I felt as though I could see the narrator reshaping herself over and over again in response to the various tales or elements of them. I found that such a rich way to write a kid’s experience with them.
Brian S: I absolutely adored the poem “Goblin School,” by the way, especially the lines “We were d&d squared. / The ones with wild hair. / Poor penmanship. Jheri curl envy. / Asthma sniffler.” That was like junior high school me, except for the jheri curl thing.
Carmen: That was particularly important to me, giving voice to marginalized figures. I wanted the book to also address class marginalization because I think that’s a big trope in fairy tales.
Absolutely. Each tale allows her to test herself and define herself.
I tried to capture junior high. The most challenging gauntlet.
Brian S: You did for me, right down to the inhaler.
Carmen: :).
Thelma: Agh, junior high—where character is forged but psyches are damaged forever.
Brian S: You’ve had two books come out in quick succession. What’s the timeline on this one and The City She Was?
Carmen: I started writing this book in 2001 or 2002. I kept setting it aside because, although I knew what I wanted to do, I didn’t know how to do it. As the years went by and I got a little better at writing poems, I would occasionally dip back into it, but when I started writing The City She Was about three years ago, I developed this mindset, I guess I called it my Charles Dickens mindset, in which I would write and labor every day even on things I didn’t want to do or didn’t think I could do, and I had the wherewithal and the commitment to finish book of linked poems. The City She Was was a dress rehearsal of linked poems for the monster that this one would be. And I wrote tons of new poems for it, day after day.
Brian S: How hard is it finding time to write while you’re running Noemi Press?
Thelma: And editing a pretty hefty lit mag… ?
Brian S: And how hectic is the publishing side of things these days?
Carmen: I do have a hard time having a balanced life and writing, so I don’t have a balanced life. There are always times that I could be doing something else, but I choose to write. I don’t exercise as much as I could and my kids could be piano virtuosos or Noemi Press could be the next Copper Canyon, but the poetry takes over. With that said, I do most of my writing late at night. And because I only have this rare amount of time, I really focus and don’t let obstacles stop me. I work on multiple poems at once, so if I’m losing steam on one poem, I pick up another.
Noemi is going well. We’re bringing out amazing books, which is the real joy of being a publisher.
Brian S: How big is Noemi in terms of people working there?
Thelma: I have a beautiful Noemi chapbook by Joanna Howard. Folks, these are art books.
Carmen: Noemi is run with spit and wit, really. We have a Prose Editor, Mike Meginnis and a Poetry Editor, J. Michael Martinez, and a lot of help from other folks. But it’s a shoestring operation.
Thelma: I don’t know how to pronounce the name though.
Carmen: Thanks, Thelma! We’ve moved a bit away from the chapbooks because they’re labor-intensive. No-Em-EE.
Brian S: Is it an indie or are you affiliated with an institution? Sorry for all these business type questions, but I’m interested in my role as an editor.
Carmen: We’re indie although I’ve gotten a lot of support from graduate students in the program over the years.
Brian S: You were working on this and The City She Was simultaneously, you said. Did you have poems that started out as part of one project that wound up in the other?
Carmen: Definitely. “Theory Report” was cut from my first book, Odalisque in Pieces.
Katrina: Carmen, I love what you say about balance (and not) and working on everything simultaneously (sounds familiar). I’d love if you’d talk some about how the book arcs to the final poem, how there’s a kind of resolution or revelation about “tale”… and i’m curious about this literally and metaphorically and in terms of how the next work has emerged in the wake of this book’s discoveries… (but I don’t mean to interrupt).
Carmen: No, not at all. I’m not entirely satisfied with the end of the book, and I really struggled because I didn’t want to be end-y, but the arc of tales sort of requires that. But I did want to suggest that ending is a type of redemption because a new story can start.
Katrina: I love the surety of the voice and claims in the final poem.
Thelma: Me too, Katrina.
Carmen: Thank you. The other realization was that her escape wasn’t a real escape, but another trap. The city was a physical escape, one with more possibility. I didn’t think of how fraught city would be… I didn’t know this book would be picked up as quickly as it was, though.
Katrina: and, as though there could ever be “no more dying…” which made me wonder about the faith/fate that the written vs. lived worlds present.
Carmen: I think it also describes coming into writing. Owl Girl uses her ability to escape as way of being a force in the world as a writer of tales herself.
Thelma: Tongue-Cut Sparrow also seemed final-poemish, the last bit of it at least.
Carmen: That one did come very late in the writing of this book, and it’s a favorite, honestly. I felt like I needed to bring back some of the earlier manifestations of the “Goblin School” voice. I did a lot of work so that the voices were balanced in the sections. When I wrote “Sparrow” I wanted that voice that wanted to shiver oceans to claim her mantle, despite the lows of her story.
Thelma: Carmen, what’s next for you?
Carmen: LOL. Right now I’m working on a few projects. This is how I work, multiple escape hatches. The first is a nonfiction book on television. I’m insanely writing lyric essays for one-hundred different television shows. The next is a collection of essays about squander and failure. The third is a book of linked poems about my mother’s Alzheimer’s.
Thelma: Yikes, that’s some serious multitasking. Sorry about your mom…
Brian S: One-hundred different TV shows would drive me insane. But I feel the Alzheimer’s poems—my dad has it and it’s been the subject of a few of my own lately.
Thelma: And is Treme one of the shows? (It’s my favorite these days.)
Carmen: Thanks. I don’t see it as multitasking. It’s how I get things done. I can’t claim being blocked. Wow, Brian. How is it for you?
Yes, Treme is one of the shows. I love it. There is a lot of junk on the list, and I’ve got six still to do.
Brian S: Complicated by the fact that my parents basically disowned me when I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses sixteen years ago. The poems are coming slowly. I haven’t tried to publish any of them yet.
Any sci-fi on the list?
Carmen: Sci-fi is huge for me. Fringe is a favorite. BSG.
I’d love to see some poems, Brian.
Brian S: I have a love-hate relationship with BSG. Love the first 2.5 seasons, hate the rest.
Carmen: Reality television is also really big, especially true crime shows. There’s my weakness.
I ended up hating that it was about God somehow. Like Lost. Don’t get me started.
Thelma: Breaking Bad?
Carmen: Literally deus ex machina. Breaking Bad, absolutely. A lot of British television as well.
Brian S: Where did “Frog At the Moment of Impact” come from? I don’t mean the fairy tale—I mean what made you choose the frog’s POV there?
Carmen: Because the princess’s POV didn’t interest me as much as this frog who was only trying to be nice and who gets implicated in the patriarchal showdown of forced marriage.
Brian S: And winds up eating the wall for his trouble.
Carmen: I mean he was trying to get married, yes, but… he gets thrown against the wall, then this releases him from his troubles, the force of her rage. I love that she throws him though, but I couldn’t do much with it. I tend to like the edges of stories rather than the stories themselves.
Thelma: I loved Princess Madhouse… Especially how it ended.
Carmen: Thank you. That was about a real psychiatric hospital I went to in high school.
Brian S: Well with those sorts of stories, there’s so much room to play around at the edges. I mean, the stories themselves aren’t well-developed, so there’s all sorts of stuff to do with secondary and tertiary characters.
Carmen: Absolutely. And even the film adaptations that are so noisy still have gaps and minor characters that are rich and provocative.
Brian S: The extent to which I like the first Shrek movie is based on the secondary characters who get facetime. The Gingerbread Man, for instance.
Carmen: I don’t think I’m done with the tales, not by a long shot. They’ll be in all my books. Shrek is brilliant. I loved the critique in Shrek. Snarky tales.
Brian S: “The Renegade Fairy at Beauty’s Ball” was another favorite, especially the snark in the line “Sleeping Beauty’s narcosis was such a smart scenario.”
Katrina: With your love of tale, do you think you’ll write stories or a novel?
Carmen: I want to write fiction, Katrina, I do. I have a very raw little beginning of something, and it’s beginning to look like if it ever gets written, it’ll be through tales. But writing prose takes such huge chunks of time.
Katrina: So true, at least in my small experience!!
Kat: Carmen, did you write poems as a child? I hear it in your writer’s voice.
Carmen: I didn’t really write poems or know that I had any right to until high school. Here’s the other beauty of fairy tales: there’s no particular entitlement required to engage with them. I wrote stories, but mostly lived in my head as deeply as Owl Girl does.
Brian S: I was the same way—wrote poems in high school as part of an assignment, and then the next year a teacher introduced us to e. e. cummings by writing “in just Spring” on the chalkboard, and I was hooked.
Carmen: e. e. cummings was my gateway too!
Brian S: Thanks for chatting with us today Carmen, and for this terrific book.
Carmen: Thanks so much!
Thelma: Yes, thanks!
Brian S: Thanks to everyone for your great questions and for putting up with my attempts to talk about things other than the book.
Learn more about The Rumpus Book Club here. More from this author →
Cruel Futures
Author
Carmen Giménez Smith
Publisher
City Lights
Year
2018
Type
Poetry Book
Find on
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Cruel Futures (City Lights, April 2018)
Cruel Futures (City Lights, April 2018)
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by Major Jackson
In Carmen Giménez Smith’s Cruel Futures, it’s clear she is not interested in the kind of static attention one associates with William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Instead Giménez Smith has places to go and then to take off from again, in the form, mainly, of social and political critiques. “I’m a receptacle / disguised as a person—but still, technically, / a person. The dog was Platonic / in his cuteness, was a figure / in discourse, yet still just a shadow / of the diligent mind I once was, / dense with memes and laments.” Although her poems achieve a certain velocity, she still manages to delve into volcanic meaning and bask in the mirror of self-reflection. “I’m driven by envy, / and gluttony, the desire to consume better / than anyone else.” To truly relish her talent is to understand her intellect as one of those plasma balls that lights up with bolts of electricity when one’s hand touches it. The speakers in her poems are charming, self-deprecating, humorous, and awed, especially when they portray what life is like as a mother, a wife, an artist, and a consumer of popular culture and literature: “My petty Madame Bovarian despair is at the core of all my watching!” Because Giménez Smith experiments with a thicker set of references and inferential imagery than most, poems such as “Of Property,” “As Body,” and “Ravers Having Babies” seem to outpace whatever triggered their origin, and she almost always arrives at pure lyric possession: “I’d like / to begin loading this heteroglossia / with more brutality, but I keep finding / a new pith: make it even realer.”
Quoted in Sidelights: “The maturity of her work shines through every word,” “Her capacity to weave together different narrative modes or voices is heightened.” “a collection of incredible humor, wry and witty,” “perform a special kind of sleight-of-hand, misdirecting your attention so you are expecting one thing, and thus preparing you for the full force of the punch a few lines later.” Afferez added: “I wouldn’t mind having these poems to accompany me through the apocalypse.”
Cruel Futures,
Carmen Giménez Smith
// review by AK Afferez //
05.09.2018
In an interview last December with Cosmonauts, when asked what she would do if she won the lottery, Carmen Giménez Smith replied, “Buy a commune, pay off all my peeps’ debts, then move us all into the mountains as we inch towards the apocalypse.” Her upcoming collection, Cruel Futures, displays this same strong sense of community, and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind having these poems to accompany me through the apocalypse.
Cruel Futures is Giménez Smith’s fifth poetry collection, and the maturity of her work shines through every word. A prolific writer, in addition to writing a memoir, Giménez Smith has published poetry, both in full-length collections and in chapbooks, and has edited a short fiction anthology of stories based on fairy tales. Her capacity to weave together different narrative modes or voices is heightened in Cruel Features, especially since the collection, embedded in the speaker’s body as it is, seeks to bring to light the multiplicity of her experience as a middle-aged Latina woman and mother. In her position, she must contend with the myriad of ways society forcefully assigns her gendered roles and expectations. Smith doesn’t shy away from admitting that things like beauty are among her primary concerns; she doesn’t know what it is besides a “careworn tale” as the title puts it, a question that is relentless and provides no answer for women:
That was a recent revolution.
The moral of the story reads
On the day she truly realized
she was beautiful, she died.
But if there’s injunction, there’s also, always, an escape route. Here, escaping means embracing the inner monster, what lurks “on the corner of identity / and shadow” (“As Body”). To witches who ask “What are you”, the speaker answers, “a monster / of my own making.” That this assertion occurs in a poem named “Dispatch from Midlife” is no coincidence: middle-age signifies a repositioning, a radical shift in the perception of the self, since society ties up so much of women’s worth in youth. Later, the identification notably with Medusa, hailed as “one of the first witches” - a sorceress who gifted her story “to pre-feminism” - gestures at the creation of a lineage, one that will inspire to, in turn, shape the world in which she wants her daughter to live:
I am close
to setting my girl into the world, more she is
ready to launch into it. I want to clear the dross
of misogyny, so she won’t suffer under its yoke.
I’ll paint my face, take off my earrings, do the inevitable. (“Ethos”)
Monstrosity isn’t just about womanhood, but also about mental health. From the beginning, the weight of the medical lurks through the lines, as when the speaker writes:
Should have been born pale
scion or with less oddity, less
diagnosis.
Words like “narcissicism,” “mania,” or “anxiety” riddle the poems, and the speaker excavates them, trying to make sense of such clinicality, whether for herself or for others. In “Bipolar Objective Correlative,” the image of “a coil of lightning” helps the speaker understand the entanglements of the self, the mind, the body (“to erase / the self from the mind, if it / weren’t for the corporeal / muck”) that get her “twisted / into a monster.” In “Dementia Elegy,” the image of “sinister / motels,” haunted and abandoned, gestures at a deeper reflection on her relationship with her mother. Often, poems are a way to cut through the fog brought about as in “Migraine Code Switch,” where the back-and-forth between Spanish and English, the thrumming of alliterations, and the repetition of “títere” (“puppet”) are all strategies to name and write through the sensation so as to regain some sense, some form of control over one’s body and mind, similar to the isolation chamber Giménez Smith later describes in “Oakland Float,” a chamber which allowed her to “know what [she] was without the noise of the world / buzzing in [her].”
In Cruel Futures the poems perform a special kind of sleight-of-hand, misdirecting your attention so you are expecting one thing, and thus preparing you for the full force of the punch a few lines later. Take the opening poem, “Love Actually” - it’s funny, it’s about pop culture and mumblecore, it’s short and ironic, but also wistful. Turn the page, and “As Body” has you spiraling into a sharp-toothed reflection on growing up as a girl, as a “trouble magnet” whose body “unhinges at the psyche.” The speaker never minces her words: “I grew up on the edge / of your electrified fence / like a weed.” In turn, the portrayal of her relationship, later in life, to motherhood and to her children shows that tenderness and sharpness of insight are far from incompatible: in “Ravers Have Babies,” she explores the kind of lineage she is transmitting to her children. Her tone is often humorous, as she explains that “I didn’t make them organic or French yet / I think it’s too late but we’ll live”; but the final lines of that poem offer a sudden pang of poignancy: “To them the imaginary is still marvel / though each minute inverts them away from me”. Motherhood, like womanhood, is nothing stable; it requires a constant reshuffling of perception.
This is a collection of incredible humor, wry and witty. In the opening poem, she mentions things that don’t exist, “like / unicorns and democracy”; later she skewers the mainstream complacency with Nazism, gentrification, white supremacy and current governmental “Voldemort style management.” “Use Your Words,” an abecedarian mismashing contemporary political buzzwords, reveals the extent of linguistic distortion in such a political climate. Smith tackles existential crises and pop culture in the same breath; she confronts the ways TV has shaped her relationship to the world and to reality through a series of mordant observations on race, gender, and violence in media. She riffs off Adam Smith’s assertion that “All money is a matter of belief,” casually asserting: “I’d sell my soul, but there aren’t any takers.” And if Cruel Futures ends on a lullaby, it is meant as a song to jolt you awake.
Buy Cruel Futures here. Peruse Carmen Giménez Smith's website for more info on her other works, and keep up with her on twitter.
A.K. Afferez is the Director of Spotlight Series at Winter Tangerine. Recent poems have appeared in Teen Vogue and Wyvern Lit; in parallel, they write for the Ploughshares blog and serve as Nonfiction Editor at Vagabond City. Favorite small talk topics are lesbian history, tarot, and the apocalypse.
Book Review: The City She Was (Somatic)
Carmen Giménez Smith
Image
Publisher: Center of Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
ISBN: 978-1-886535-19-8
ISBN: 978-1-885635-23-5
Somatic Review of Carmen Giménez Smith’s The City She Was
Carmen Giménez Smith’s The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing)
Around eleven o’clock in the evening, take only your house keys and walk
through the city. Smell the air, feel its breath on your skin. Watch strangers,
identify a beggar. Imagine you are the beggar. Watch the buildings watching
you. Wonder what they have seen, what they know. Allow a mild paranoia to
build. Take the long way home. Walk under unkempt trees. Once home, turn
on only a strand of red mini lights, find ambient music. Take a moment to
FEEL. FEEL the city moving around you. FEEL how empty and alone you are.
Pick up the book, begin to read. As you read recall the WHISPERS from the
buildings and how the trees watched you. This book needs a background,
you are that background. Be subsumed into the poems. Remember, you ARE
the city, “…You’ll smell it in my black fur./ I’ll be the apartment ghost: pass
through walls, /through realism, but smaller, quieter,/ the tumor in the center
of your heart charka.” Pause. Take a moment to soak in the ambient music.
Let yourself become UNCOMFOTABLE. Resume reading allowing the book to
lull you into its complexity, its compassion. This book FEELS for you, “Even
for a bad zoning decision, I’ll bleed so much you’ll be bleeding,/ all of us
bleeding in and out like it’s breathing,/ or kissing and because it is righteous
and terrible and red.”
Reviewer: Aurora Smith is a first MFA in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University
Quoted in Sidelights: “Unlike the falsifications of James Frey, this fictive/imagined voice has a purpose: to embody the stress of Giménez Smith’s expanding family through the conjuration of what her mother must have endured.” The memoir adds up to “a strangely eloquent and fragmented meditation on motherhood’s woe,” he concluded.
Motherhood, disenthralled
by Thomas Larson
Talismans book cover
Bring Down the Little Birds
by Carmen Giménez Smith
2010
The University of Arizona Press
Buy this book
This slim memoir is soaked in the partum-based worry many mothers-to-be endure. The birth year Giménez Smith covers overlaps with her mother’s prognosis of, and tre atment for, a brain tumor. These threads, as well as some fictive turns and angry toddlers, are laced together, making for a strangely eloquent and fragmented meditation on motherhood’s woe. Few joys of pregnancy intrude—pickles and ice cream and padding around the house barefoot. A poet, editor, and teacher, Giménez Smith is too honest a writer to row that clichéd river.
For the author, a second child and the family’s ensuing chaos guarantee lost time—away from her students, husband, and writing. How will she survive? How did her mother do it? How will she bear her mother’s illness? And then how quickly she feels guilty and possessive, constantly making adjustments: “There are no amateurs in the world of children.”
Bring Down the Little Birds is a hyper-shifting collage—parts taken from Giménez Smith’s (actual) journal, parts lifted from her mother’s (imagined) writing, parts written in the throes of birthing a second child. The memoir races forward with space breaks and divisional asterisks separating thoughts and scenes—the fragmentation fits the author’s write-when-you-can, beleaguered condition.
The book begins with Giménez Smith’s imagined “discovery” of her mother’s journal. “I daydream that I’m thirteen, sitting in an attic in my mother’s wedding dress. I discover a notebook, in it the evidence of my mother’s secret life.” In fact, Giménez Smith’s mother, who came from Peru, settled in New York City, and had four children (one dying in childbirth), undergirds the memoir as the stalwart Mom whose standard the daughter emulates and contends with.
In creating her mother’s journal, Giménez Smith makes the woman into the kind of mother who’ll be more useful to her than, or perhaps a balance to, either the stalwart Mom or the actual one who’s ill. “Because I cared little for my mother’s interior, it didn’t exist for me. My mother couldn’t be a mystery. . . . She was only a mystery when I needed one for the story I made of my life.”
Unlike the falsifications of James Frey, this fictive/imagined voice has a purpose: to embody the stress of Giménez Smith’s expanding family through the conjuration of what her mother must have endured. “I would have liked to have known her [the mother] better,” she writes, “but I was too occupied pulling her out of herself. Now the tables are turned—it’s a brand new table.” Mothers are always becoming their mothers.
A constantly unsettled wanting guides it all, in and out of childbirth: the desire to escape, to be helped, to be pitied, to re-inhabit the fear and love associated with her own birth. Such is the time-hopping terrain of this memoir, whose engagement comes from the disciplined interweaving of remembrance and emotion.
Equal to the mot her as a transformational dynamo are her experiences with her children. Study the texture of this instance in which Giménez Smith presents us her most shameful act.
But one day my son slaps me across the face. A straight-up bitch slap. And within a microsecond of his hand touching my face, I slap him back. Stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury. Wow. I’m that mother, the one yanking her kid by the arm out of the grocery store, the one who gets really close in her kid’s face and hisses.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The Spanking Mother. The Mother Trapped in a Cycle. I tabulate the long-term effects as I weep in the bathroom, as my husband sits on the other side of the door. He is furious and forgiving. Me too. Mama, hold you.
Those last three child-forgiving words are heartbreaking. You can hear in the prose a kind of melded authorial identity, a mosaic of voices—narrator, observer, satirist, rationalizer, quoter (from Medea), pleading child. The passage is like a stew: thickened on rage, simmered with guilt, salted with irony, and served scalding.
In the end, the mother’s tumor is the least spun thread of the memoir; it’s kept at bay by the other voices. But it’s OK. Giménez Smith’s mother, flying to Peru for treatment, has proved more useful as myth than presence, just what her daughter-now-mother has required.
Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Bring Down the Little Birds reads like the notebook of a mother who snatches bits of time to jot down her thoughts,” related Literary Mama online contributor Marilyn Bousquin. “Yet make no mistake: this is a literary notebook crafted by a poet who delights in each turn of phrase.”
The Syntax of Motherhood: A Review of Bring Down the Little Birds
Marilyn Bousquin
April 2012
2 comments
Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work and Everything Else
Carmen Giménez Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2010; $15.95
When I was in labor, at the height of contractions I began to scream, "Mama! Mama! Mama!" in a voice I did not recognize: I had never in my life called my mother "Mama." Yet, despite my delirium, I experienced a surge of strength beyond muscle, reason, determination. Time and space collapsed, the nurses and midwife stopped whispering the word Caesarean, and I delivered my son vaginally despite the mounting odds.
Carmen Giménez Smith's memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else, returned me to this experience anew and allowed me to recognize my maternal strength, stamina, and grit. Bring Down the Little Birds carries the power to shift our perception of motherhood and the way we see ourselves as mothers. "The word mama existing in so many languages," Giménez Smith writes, "Or is it all languages? Mother, roots that fix me to the earth. Umbilical tethers. Matrices, then cicatriz. . . . Spanish for scar. Motherhood = scar. The stretch marks on the skin over my hips, that cradle they make. Matrices like the pith of an orange, ragged and juicy."
An award-winning author of three poetry collections -- Goodbye, Flicker; The City She Was; and Odalisque in Pieces -- Giménez Smith brings poetic impulse to every syllable of her latest work. At once memoir, book-length essay, and epic poem (motherhood as heroic quest), Bring Down the Little Birds gathers, weaves, and illuminates the multi-faceted complexities of motherhood. I am tempted to label it a "literary nest" spun from fragments of experience, memory, reflection, imagination, pop culture, literature, and language.
The book opens when Giménez Smith is pregnant, her daughter is "the bud of a baby inside me," and her son is a toddler. Early in this second pregnancy, she discovers that her own mother is beginning to fail, her memory in decline. It is this tension -- pregnant daughter facing mother's mortality -- that propels the plot and provides a vantage from which Giménez Smith explores the interior and exterior landscapes of motherhood. She begins with the interior:
I daydream that I'm thirteen sitting in an attic in my mother's wedding dress. I discover a notebook, in it the evidence of my mother's secret life. I write notes from her book into mine, which is, years later, discovered by my son.
This opening fragment binds three generations through a mother's uncensored musings and also lays the groundwork for the structure of the book. Bring Down the Little Birds reads like the notebook of a mother who snatches bits of time to jot down her thoughts. Yet make no mistake: this is a literary notebook crafted by a poet who delights in each turn of phrase -- "Aging motherhoods you," for example -- and who trusts us to follow the associative leaps of her mind forward and backward in time. The opening continues:
From my mother's imaginary notebook: sketch of dancer, sketch of cabaret singer. I engage in gluttony and wild behavior.
I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet [Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own].
From my notebook: A secret is a curse. I was picked from the throngs with nothing to show.
I wonder if my children will one day discover my secret life?
Will they read the notebooks in my study? Will they care?
By weaving literary quotations into her narrative without citations (credits are appended), Giménez Smith reveals the mind of a woman who is both mother and writer. This clash of identities sparks Giménez Smith's internal conflict: "Which is it: Selfish Mother or Selfless Mother? Is this the only choice?"
I know lots of mothers. Mothers who mother and rock climb, mothers who mother and midwife. But writing further complicates the idea of how one makes things in the world, other things. Words, thought, language. I'm talking about language. . . .
Anything I try to write: fraught with motherhood.
As her pregnancy progresses, her own mother's memory further deteriorates. The relief of an eventual diagnosis -- brain tumor -- is nullified by fear of the unknown: Will her mother survive the surgery? Indeed, fear of her mother's mortality heightens the narrative's urgency as it deepens Giménez Smith's yearning to know her mother, a yearning that contains the emotional truth of the narrative. Giménez Smith needs to know her mother (hence, the imaginary notebook) to relieve her own internal mother-writer divide, a divide that threatens to silence her writer self, embitter her mother self. She roots this conflict in the way she sees her mother: "Because I cared little for my mother's interior, it didn't exist for me. My mother couldn't be a mystery. . . . She was only a mystery when I needed one for the story I made of my life."
The mystery, we understand, sparks Giménez Smith's burning question: What exactly is motherhood and who am I as a mother and how in the hell did my mother do this? This question insists that she look at her mother not through the eyes of the girl she once was or the rebellious adolescent or the dismissive young adult, but through the eyes of who she is now, a mother-writer expecting her second child and feeling conflicted about the demands of motherhood and, indeed, her identity as a mother. "Why I became a writer: To write my mother's way out of the tedium."
Giménez Smith then shifts the lens to her identity as a writer's wife -- her husband is writer Evan Lavender-Smith -- and her husband's experience as a father. She weaves this thread into the central mother/wife-writer conflict when her husband "gently suggests that our son is watching too much television."
I think: Better a child versed in Gilligan's Island than a mother in a padded room. Better a pop-culture blogger than a mother who irons his underwear because somewhere along the line she lost herself.
Writing, for Giménez Smith, becomes an act of self-preservation, a measure against loss of self, that she continues to contrast with her husband's experience: "I can't admit I need the writing like he does. Or he doesn't believe me: Wolf wolf."
This passage offers a wry innuendo that suggests the mother/wife-writer as a wild, yowling animal while simultaneously invoking Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the central conflict of women's literary history: time and space to write. Perkins Gilman, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century feminist writer and lecturer, argued that a woman "should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world also." Giménez Smith, who is a professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, carries this torch, as it were, into the twenty-first century. She draws on her experience in the "world of work" to voice the friction between motherhood and career:
I try to explain the timeline of pregnancy to my boss. I think to say, I feel as if I am floating on air but also fraught with arrows, but of course I end up telling her it will be very easy to balance work and family. I efface the rigors of the last weeks of pregnancy, guarantee that I will stop working for one, two weeks at most.
Thus emerges a portrait of a woman who exercises her smarts to preserve not only her sense of self but also her job and her dignity: her freedom. In doing so, Giménez Smith pushes back against the biases still leveled at mothers in the workforce today without minimizing the internal conflicts that continue to pull women in so many directions.
Despite this heavy reality, Giménez Smith never loses her sense of humor, which is wickedly self-deprecating. "I've got a bustling bottom," she writes at the height of pregnancy, "These days, if I wanted to -- and yes, I want to -- I could knock down skinny, childless women with my bottom." After her daughter is born, she muses on how her mother, who kept herself fashionable, "mothered and played lovely at the same time." In assessing her own "mien," Giménez Smith quotes a refrigerator magnet: "Does my fat ass make my fat ass look fat?" thus layering her literary landscape with pop culture and her own unapologetic quirks. My favorite instance of her ubiquitous quest for identity occurs en route to Disneyland to vacation with her mother before her mother's surgery:
Who am I? I ask myself at the airport magazine stand. Am I Vogue or am I Good Housekeeping? Allure or Redbook? I want to be Forever 21, but I'm actually Ann Taylor.
Signature Giménez Smith, this short fragment manages to convey the cultural expectations of womanhood, her own internalized self-image, and the implicit reality that career women -- Ann Taylors -- lack the tight-jeans sex appeal of twenty-one year olds.
Bring Down the Little Birds upholds the tradition of memoir in that personal experience illuminates motherhood, but the book also engages an essayist's tendency to penetrate a topic in relentless effort toward self-discovery. "It is a thorny undertaking," wrote Montaigne, "to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it." The crux of Giménez Smith's "thorny undertaking"? Rage. A rage that further escalates the mother-writer conflict:
A long day at home, no work. Full of resentment. . . .
My thoughts turn to violence. To rage, screaming. . . .
I remember. . . antagonizing my mother. She snapped and dragged me to the bathroom, put me in a cold shower. I shrieked as the water struck my clothes. . . .
Is this abuse? I wouldn't do it to my son. . . But I understand the impulse. I yell. I rage. . . .
My mother's rages passes onto me, into me.
By writing her rage back to its "innermost folds," its roots in her own mother and her own childhood, Giménez Smith begins to diffuse the mother-writer conflict until motherhood and writing converge. Motherhood becomes her syntax, her language: "When I resisted writing about them [her children], I had nothing to say. Now I spend entire days composing around them, around me through them. Motherhood is my subject and my object."
Yet as all mother-writers know, resolution is never that easy, that final. Giménez Smith continues to ask, "Art or motherhood?" and with that question a return to rage:
. . . one day my son slaps me across the face. A straight-up bitch slap. And within a microsecond of his hand touching my face, I slap him back. Stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury [Euripedes]. Wow. I'm that mother, the one yanking her kid by the arm out of the grocery store, the one who gets really close in her kid's face and hisses.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The Spanking Mother. The Mother Trapped in a Cycle. . . .
To return to her. . . to repossess and be repossessed by her [Adrienne Rich]. Don't know where my anger comes from or where to put it. To retreat into myself: the dream I have. To undo whatever moved me to hit him. I am a history of mothering.
By realizing herself in this climactic moment of discovery as a "history of mothering," Giménez Smith elevates mothering to a phenomenon worthy of its own history, its own plot, its own story. And she understands this: Motherhood demands that you show up as your own flawed self, whoever you are, in whatever period in time you are a mother. This includes Giménez Smith; this includes her own mother. Two women who are, finally, less flawed than they are human, joined by desire, by regret, by mortality, and by a lineage of mothers. I cried. The kind of tears that shift perception, promise transformation.
Marilyn Bousquin
Marilyn Bousquin is the founder of Writing Women’s Lives, where she teaches online writing classes, mentors women who write about real life, and promotes literature about women’s lives. An excerpt of her memoir in progress, Searching for Salt, appears in Kate Hopper’s Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers.
She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Ashland University and an MA in children’s literature from Simmons College. Marilyn has worked as an educational writer and editor, and as a children’s book reviewer. She teaches composition at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she lives with her husband and son.
Learn more about her classes and mentoring program at Writing Women’s Lives, where she also blogs about women’s writing, women’s literature, and women’s lives as worthy of literature.
More from Marilyn Bousquin
Comments
Dear Marilyn, what a wonderful review! I haven't read this book yet, but it's been on my list. I won't delay. Thank you for your careful reading and your lovely review!
Posted by Kate Hopper on Apr 20, 2012
Thanks, Kate. Move Bring Down the Little Birds to the top of your list ;> You're in for a lyric treat. Best, M
Posted by Marilyn Bousquin on Apr 23, 2012
Comments are now closed for this piece.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The battle [for gender equity] will never end. It is an ongoing battle. We’re not only fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for our mothers, and our grandmothers, and our daughters, and their daughters.”
A Conversation with Carmen Giménez Smith
01/18/12
The first thing I need to say is that after reading this book I felt like I totally needed Carmen to be my best friend. Not in a silly BFF way, but in a professional way -- because it is really, really difficult to make 30-year-old life decisions (dating, marriage, children) when all I’ve got so far is an MA and one book from a small press (not that I’m complaining). Still, if I were to apply next year to PhD programs, I’d be in my mid-thirties by the time I even thought about going on the job market -- and even if I did get a job, I feel like those first few not-tenured-yet years are no time to have babies. So, my first question for Carmen is below:
Molly Gaudry: What’s a woman to do?
Carmen Giménez Smith: A woman should do what she can to ensure that she achieves her ambitions, and ensure that she has agency in the world. My life often requires nips and tucks to achieve this, but I’m a much happier person than I would be if I operated under the cultural assumptions about womanhood and motherhood. I find fulfillment in the insane range of experience in my life, including my job, my creative work, my curatorial work and my mothering. I can’t say there are tried and true strategies for fulfillment though. I try not to compromise and I try to compromise. I try not to do too much and I do too much. I try to be mindful, but I am often mindless.
Ugh, but I don’t want to seem like I have some kind of answer because in so many ways, my life constantly feels precarious. At the moment, I owe two essays that I can’t seem to end, I’m waiting for an important phone call that’s stressing me out, my daughter might be coming down with a cold, my house looks like it’s been robbed and I have a lot of grading to do. I still wouldn’t trade it. I think you probably know what to do, in fact, you have a plan. When I was in my early 30s, I was a hot mess. I didn’t have a book, and I was phoning it in lifewise. I think you’re doing quite well!
MG: “Hot mess” is awesome. Also awesome is your book, and the language you use, the moments of meditation and revelation that unfold and unfold as your narrative progresses. While we’ll definitely talk about language more, I wonder if you would be willing to unpack the following excerpt for us and maybe also tell us more about these specific (or abstract) dreams:
“The days divided into two: working and mothering. The third part, which is me, lives in my dreams.”
CGS: I think there’s a weird thing that happens to time when you don’t have much time to yourself. I feel like I’m constantly writing and thinking about writing throughout the day, and that’s the third part of my day, and it’s simultaneous.
MG: What role do notebooks play in your daily “writing and thinking about writing”? And when did you start keeping them?
CGS: I have tons of notebooks, and I use them a lot. I started keeping them about ten years ago. I write whatever comes to my mind and I do a lot of revision in them, but I also write directions and to do lists and recipes in them, so they don’t have any clear narrative or system at work. In fact, I carry three notebooks at a time, so I’m often digging around looking for where I wrote something down. The reason I carry three is that they each have a nature or a quality. I guess I don’t want to not write something down if the notebook isn’t right for it. Unfortunately, that’s not the weirdest thing about me.
MG: Structurally, your book reminds me of Carole Maso’s AVA. I’m interested to know what books or writers influenced, inspired, or otherwise impacted Bring Down the Little Birds.
CGS: I love Carole Maso, and I think she probably was in the backdrop of influence, but also Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, Lia Purpura’s Increase, Jenny Boully’s The Body and John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame. Another big influence was Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. Her frankness about the complex feelings she had about her mothering gave me the courage to really put it all out there.
I read so many books about mothers, mothering, but every book that I read ended up through the filter of my mothering, of the book. I have pages and pages of notes from other texts that I read at the time that didn’t make it into the book.
The book started as a lyric essay, my first real attempt, and I realized that I wanted to keep going with it, and I wanted to write about my mom and everything she was going through. The book was very much written in the moment, so it was cathartic. I had notebooks and notebooks of stuff that I thought might end up in the book. I have a file on my computer called “Mothering Fragments (the original title of the book) Orphans,” and its pages of passages that I cut out of the book.
At a certain point, I began to juggle the different fragments so that there was resonance within the shorter moments and in order to create more chronology and more arc. The idea for the imaginary notebooks was a suggestion from both my husband and from Kevin McIlvoy.
I learned a lot about structure writing that book, and there are a few things I’d have done differently, but I suppose that’s the life of a writer. I’ll do it better the next time.
MG: Can we talk about lyric essays? It seems that they’re a sort of hybrid form, in that they are both poetry and essay. Do you consider yourself a poet mostly? Will you write more lyric essays in the future?
CGS: I’m at work on a couple of projects with a lyric essay component, although I’m also trying my hand at straight NF. I’m trained as a poet, so I think of myself primarily as a poet with a deep curiosity and respect for what can happen in NF. When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist, and I got derailed into this stuff!
One of the books I’m working on is about television and the other is about failure. There’s a lot of intersection there. I also want to write about body weight, like an Arcades Project about fat asses, but that’s in the conception phase.
MG: What about the structure? What did you learn? Or, what did this book teach you about structure that your previous titles didn’t?
CGS: Bring Down the Little Birds was the first book with a large-scale structure I had to deal with, and after I wrote it, I was able to return to a book of linked poems that I had been working on for ages and knew a lot more about how to order it. I can’t describe exactly what it is I learned except maybe being very aware of how a writer gives and withholds and how this pattern can be really exciting and dynamic. The first book I wrote was a collection of poems, and I really relied on other people to help me order it, but BDTLB was such a huge undertaking, I really had to do a lot of the work on my own. I had to learn to define what felt instinctual so I could apply it throughout the book.
Although each book is unique, I do find myself, as I’m working on new NF books, returning to some of the strategies for writing that I used in writing BDTLB. I really resisted the fragment, but now I’m going with it because I can remember that the fragment was a great drafting strategy. I’m writing shorter passages or sections that may or may not become longer because this can be generative. And I’m trying not to worry about structure or redundancy at earlier stages, which helps me just generate, something I really struggle with.
When all is said and done, the book is chronological, a really traditional narrative form. Maybe the chronology has a little more in common with Mrs. Dalloway than with War and Peace, but by laying down that structure as a scaffold, I had latitude.
MG: You have a new book that has just been released, right? Can you tell us about it?
CGS: My book, The City She Was, was recently published by the Center for Literary Publishing. I’ve been writing nonfiction lately and thinking a lot about the books that make a book, and The City She Was’s bibliography contains Ovid, Mandelstam, Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines, Grimms’ fairy tales, Francesca Woodman and Allen Ginsberg. The book began as an homage to Ovid’s poems of exile. Later, I began to think about an exile within an exile, about what living in a city can be like and how much I miss living in the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, so it’s a bit of a love poem to home.
I just received the galleys for my next book, which won the Juniper Prize last year. It’s called Goodbye, Flicker, and I’d been working on the book for ten years before I sent it out, so it’s surreal to see it finally come together. University of Massachusetts brings it out in April of this year.
MG: What’s next for you?
CGS: Right now, I’m working on two nonfiction projects, a collection of essays (many of them about squander and decision theory) and another one about TV. Poetrywise, I’m working on a final draft for a book of poems University of Arizona is publishing in 2013, a bit of a tribute to second wave feminism called Gender Fables. I’m also starting a new book about memory and family, and Alzheimer’s.
Molly Gaudry
Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards and shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil. She is the founder of The Lit Pub.
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Bring Down the Little Birds
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Buy this book
BRING DOWN THE LITTLE BIRDS:
On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else
(non-fiction)
By Carmen Gimenez Smith
112 pp. University of Arizona $15.95
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
Bring Down the Little Birds is a kaleidoscopic look at motherhood and “everything else” in the author’s life. Told in snippets of memory, like scenes or snapshots, Carmen Smith writes of the years when her second child was about to be born and her own mother was dying of a brain tumor and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Smith, a working mother, struggled to find her own place:
Work, home, work, home. Like a timer, my breasts leak at work. I end class early, rush home to my baby, who needs my body, who needs my body. Work, home, work, home, work, home.
Birds reads like a journal: fragments of thoughts and observations scribbled in a notebook left beside the bed to record flashes of insight upon awakening. Yet Smith brings an organization to the content, a loose sequential structure that elevates the book above a mere journal.
That said, there’s a sense that Smith stopped short of the real work of pulling all the fragments into a cohesive full-blown narrative of the issues she faced in keeping her life in balance. So many of us have a life in fragments in a bedside journal that will never see publication.
Still, this slim read will resonate with mothers and daughters of any age or stage. Smith shares the ambiguities and frustrations of motherhood along with the joys. Motherhood is neither glorified, nor denigrated—it just is.
Smith is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University and the author of Odalisque in Pieces, a collection of poetry.
Posted 20th October 2010 by Gary Presley
Labels: Carmen Gimenez Smith poetry ruth douillette
Bring Down the Little Birds
By Carmen Giménez Smith
The University of Arizona Press
August 2010, Paperback
112 pages
978-0816528691
Reviewed by Jena Salon
There is a war in Mommy-world, a conflict arising from the tendency of many new mothers to assume that their own choices are the best, assume that their choices are the best for everyone, and judge other mothers—often to their faces—when they make different choices. I try not to engage. I didn’t breastfeed my children. They slept in their own cribs, in their own rooms, upon returning from the hospital. They have early, consistent bedtimes. They eat very little sugar. They do not watch TV. I try not to judge other moms. I try not to rub it in their faces that I get time alone because my children are asleep from 7pm to 7am. I try not to tell them how much crying it took to train my children to do that. I try not to defend myself and say, Listen, all the neurological studies say… But I am a fighter and easily called to arms, so mostly I try not to engage in discussions that might lead me to scream that it’s just as easy to teach your children letters (should you feel two year olds need to know them) by reading to them as by letting them watch Sesame Street.
I should want to destroy the enemy: Carmen Giménez Smith and her co-sleeping, breast-feeding-till-they’re-two, mommy-memoir-writing kind. But I don’t. I don’t wish anything ill on Giménez Smith because her new book, Bring Down the Little Birds, is full of so much emotional confusion that she can’t manage to judge anyone but herself. And also: there’s pee in her bed.
That’s right, urine.
At first, when she says, "Our bed is stained with breast milk and urine," I read it uncomfortably, wondering where the urine came from and why she hasn’t changed the sheets. Then I deduced that it was from the dog, and that she would have to change the sheets every day—or draw a boundary she’s not willing to draw—to not have pee on her sheets. She can’t change the sheets every day because she’s bone tired. Changing sheets never seemed so tiring to me before motherhood, but now I can picture the tensing of muscles as she pulls at the corners, flipping first the quilt, then the two sheets, then the pillows off the bed. An instant extra load of laundry. Every day. So instead she does what mothers do: she becomes comfortable with pee and puke and poop.
After that, I can’t help but trust her. I know she holds nothing back. This thin wisp of a memoir—all of 112 pages—is a kind of poetic litany of thoughts, roaming from writing, to working, to motherhood, to wifehood, to daughterhood, to linguistics, and then circling around again and again. Everything is imbued with complication, positives and negatives, confusion. "This semester the department assigned me a children’s literature class. Is this the motherhood ghetto of academia? / I plan to subvert it. And not just the curriculum—my motherhood as well." But she doesn’t, can’t. She loves her son, loves being a mom, and soon, she is pregnant again. Not for one second does she think she might not want the second child. But she doesn’t want to be taken over by motherhood again. Except she loves it. You see the problem.
Bringing Down the Little Birds presents moments of anguish and joy so that they twine together, jerking the reader as she feels jerked, by whimsy, resolve, and love. The paragraphs pile on top of each other, interrupting her trains of thought with structural representations of her brain on Motherhood:
Our family means something new in this bed. We are four./ A child is a blessing. Blessing once meant consecration in blood. A baby crowned in her mother’s blood. The mother blessed twice./ My uterus is shrinking inside my body. Old, wet shoe contracting in the sun./ My son gets whisked away by a series of relatives and friends. He’s with us long enough to hit the baby.
She resolves to give herself more personal time, resolves to work more, but then she writes for only "two and a half hours….Then [she] extreme-guilt mother[s ]" her son.
It turns out that despite our completely opposite parenting choices (feeding, bedtimes, etc) Giménez Smith and I have a lot in common deep down. We want to work and worry about working, we love our children and become rageful at them, we hate ourselves for wanting to be without them and we hate ourselves for the guilt. Mostly we think, think, think until we have become our own worst enemies. One day after her son "slaps [her] across the face. A straight up bitch slap," she slaps him back. Then she retreats to the bathroom where she "tabulates the long-term effects as [she] weep[s]." She is confused, regretful, self-condemning. She thinks of her own mother, the cycle of hitting that is beginning. Instead of feeling sorry, she feels like a monster.
Preparing for the births of her children, Giménez Smith decides to use midwives instead of obstetricians—she doesn’t want to "treat pregnancy as a disease, but it’s certainly shaped like one: symptoms, sign, sickness…the way it alters my sense of the body." And motherhood—having the baby—does not erase this. It only forces her to give over her life, her body, in a different way. Giménez Smith and I have made different choices, but our bodies take the same beating. I understand her worry. I am with her. That is, until she is at Disneyland with her two children and husband and mother, and she falls ill. Instead of staying in bed for the day she realizes "[t]he sick thing can only be for a little while. I have to let it go because of everyone in the room. My mother’s worry, my husband’s exhaustion, my children need me. I shake it off." My blood rages.
Her husband would lay sick in bed if he needed to!
And yet, really, I’m not appalled by her inability to let herself heal when she needs it. I’m appalled by how easy it is, looking in from the outside, to see the ridiculousness of the feeling that your family would not survive without you for a few hours; I am appalled because I know I’ve suffered the same delusion.
This is what is most difficult about motherhood, what Giménez Smith is really getting at. Talking about the small moments and the individual feelings make them "become ordinary" to anyone else, and yet the rage and sadness and love and confusion and insanity swarm, consuming every moment of every day. Those moments in Bring Down the Little Birds feel real and important. Those moments speak of love. Rationality be damned.
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A Review of Angels of the Americlypse:
An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing
Candice Amich
Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing
Edited by Carmen Giménez-Smith and John Chávez
Denver, CO: Counterpath, 2014.
352 pages. $35.00 (paperback)
Recalling that the word “anthology” derives from the Greek compound for “flower-gathering” (as in a collection of the “flowers” of verse), Angels of the Americlypse arrives as a wild bundling of poetry, performance, and prose. This exquisitely unruly bunch gathers 21 21st century writers of heterogeneous backgrounds, in an attempt “to widen the notion of what Latino letters look[s] like outside of … conscripted lyric and narrative traditions” (xi). In the introductions that precede each selection of writing, as well as the “aesthetic statements” that follow, references to giants of both Anglo-American modernism and Latin@ American postmodernism recur: Samuel Beckett and Nicanor Parra, Gertrude Stein and Gloria Anzaldúa. Editors Carmen Giménez-Smith and John Chávez bring together established bilingual experimental poets such as Juan Felipe Herrera and Mónica de la Torre with acclaimed prose stylists such as Joy Castro and Achy Obejas.
Such an anthology is necessary now. In fact, its time is overdue. The editors cite Charlie Chan is Dead (1993) as a model, admiring Jessica Hagedorn’s extensive selection of formally innovative Asian American writers. For African American literature, Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (1997) recovers an expansive field of 20th cenury black experimentation. Angels of the Americlypse thus fills an important gap in an emerging canon of ethnic American avant-garde literatures.
In the world of visual and performing arts, ties between Latin@ and Latin American avant-gardes, and unorthodox examinations of the politics of identity, anticipate the cultural work of Angels of the Americlypse. Fittingly, the anthology’s title is borrowed from the performative work of Rodrigo Toscano. Toscano’s “Pig Angels of the Americlypse,” an example of his self-styled Collapsible Poetics Theater, tests the limits of poetic form. Toscano imagines “players” (not characters) that step in and out of their roles (á la Brecht, á la Boal) in order to press their audiences to question the borders or frames of their social lives. Manipulating language to disturb rigid orders of belonging and citizenship, Toscano’s work owes a debt to border-crossing performance artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña. These are performance scripts that crave embodiment and leave space for improvisation:
{P1} Nationstate up — personal dreams down — got it?
{P2} These puercos, sin destinos … {as an aside} lively bunch.
{P3} {in singsong tone}
“Ethos, lady sovereign, be not my decay!
Tell me tell me
Who are the real Americans of today?”
The poem-play’s questioning of the status of the ‘American’ opens the anthology out into vistas of hemispheric experimentation that a more narrow focus on U.S. influences obscures, and which the borderlands, in which these collected works dwell, insist on.
A coincidence of letters, the alphabetical contents of the book nevertheless bridge translator and translated, from Rosa Alcalá to Cecilia Vicuña. The inclusion of Chilean poet, artist, and filmmaker Vicuña attests to the undeniable transnational vectors of the anthology. An image of Vicuña’s “Quipu Menstrual” installation of suspended red strands of unspun wool spans the front and back covers of the book, precariously binding the anthology’s discrepant contents.
Alcalá, who translates Vicuña’s verse here and elsewhere, is a formidable free verse force herself:
Dear Señorita Maquiladora
Dexterous, tolerant of tedium
model workers
for Electrolux, General
Electric, Alcoa, etc.,
[…]
Dear Virgen de Guadalupe,
hand us your sanitary napkin
Blessed art thou,
your blood is
on everything.
Pulsing with references to the femicide epidemic along the U.S.-Mexico border, Alcalá’s “Dear Maria,” ironically colors the colonias surrounding the maquilladora plants with the blood of a menstruating Virgin Mary.
The poetry of Daniel Borzutzky, like that of Alcalá, makes visible the vulgar logic of late capitalism. In Borzutzky’s “In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy,” the violence of the verse echoes the broken bodies of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita’s unparalleled Song for His Disappeared Love (which Borzutzky thrillingly translated in 2010): “… I’m afraid of the bodies and how they are lining them up in / the compounds, afraid of the bodies that make sentences, / afraid of the bodies and how they are like sentences.”
Working inwards towards the book’s center, the neo-confessional poetry of Cynthia Cruz and performance texts of Jennifer Tamayo similarly employ gestures of the grotesque — “transforming trash” into beauty in Cruz and wading in the murky waters of incest and myth in Tamayo to undo gender (and other punishing) binaries (71). Adding to the anthology’s collection of blooms, here is a wonderfully disturbing narcissus from Tamayo:
IV. IF YOU, THE FATHER, IS THE DEATH OF ALL
THINGS, YOU LACK AT ME & FEEL NARCISSUS
And another from Cruz:
Soon the ambassadors from the Netherworld
Will begin
Their jet-like descent. Death,
Disguised inside me, already,
As sleeze. (“Kingdom of Dirt”)
Like Sandy Florian, whose bypassing of narrative rises to what Deborah Paredez refers to as a “frenzied metatheatricality,” these poets do not write directly about their Latina heritage (76). Refusing the role of “cultural attaché,” they prefer instead to star as angels of the Americlypse, glowing with the desire “That one might read the world anew” (xi; Vicuña “Aesthetic Statement”).
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REVIEW: Angels of the Americlypse: an Anthology of New Latin@ Writing ed. Carmen Giménez Smith & John Chávez
angels
by José Angel Araguz
While Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of Latin@ Writing provides no shortage of interest, I decided to limit
myself to three “stops,” highlighting how each in their own respective way points to the inclusive/expansive spirit of the anthology, all the while detailing the unique reading experience it offers. In their introduction, the editors describe their intent as wanting “to invite, to welcome, to unerase and reinscribe, to expand the landscape by making it visible” (xvi). One of the ways in which this work is done is in the anthology’s structure: Angels presents each writer with an introduction, a sample of their work, and space for their own aesthetic statement. This thorough approach to each section allows for not only a glimpse into each writer’s literary voice as well as craft/personal voice, but, along with the introductions, points in many ways to the overall conversation each writer’s work is engaged in. This structure has the accumulative effect of evoking how alive the field of Latin@ writing is today.
Stop 1: Rosa Alcalá
In his introduction to Alcalá’s work, Peter Ramos asks: “Where is the line, the border, between one’s cultural identities and one’s supposedly true self?” (5). The selected poems that follow seem to take turns engaging with this question. Compare the first line of “Voice Activation” with that of “Paramour”:
This poem, on the other hand, is activated by the sound of my voice, and, luckily, I am a native speaker (“Voice Activation”)
English is dirty. Polyamorous…(“Paramour”)
Writing against an epigraph by Wittgenstein on how a poem “is not used in the language-game of giving information,” the first line of “Voice Activation” plays the idea of “native speaker” against that of a poem “activated by the sound of my own voice” and, doing so, complicates the act of writing. There is a powerful assertion in this line – that the writer is capable of both accessing the ineffable (with its connotations of the unknowable and unutterable) as well as being fluent in the ineffable – that is later counterpointed in the poem by lines like:
Have no doubt, my poem is innocent and transparent. So when I say, I think I’ll make myself a sandwich, the poem does not say, I drink an isle of bad trips (6).
In using the language of reassurance, Alcalá is able to both allay the ineffable as well as invite it in. This ability to navigate between the several ways language(s) can mean (and unmean) is a key facet of much of in this anthology, one that highlights the sentiment behind the line “English is dirty. Polyamorous.” In the two short sentences that open the poem “Paramour,” an act of “unerasing” and “reinscribing” occurs, which is repeated and developed, becoming a rhetorical engine driving the rest of the poem.
Stop 2: Norma E. Cantú
In her aesthetic statement, Norma E. Cantú describes herself as being “[t]rained in semiotics” as well as “an undocumented folklorist – that is, I do not have any formal training in folkloristics” (54). If these statements are unpacked a bit more, Cantú can first be seen as a reader of signs. The latter statement’s juxtaposition of the word “undocumented” with the vocation of “folklorist” – the former a charged word for Latin@s, at times meaning illegal, and often implied in describing someone as being sin papeles (without papers) – complicates both terms, expressing an interest in both signs and folklore beyond the page (beyond papers). As the title of her aesthetic statement makes clear, Cantú focuses her reading of sign and folklore in order to “[See/Look] through a Chicana Third Space Feminist Lens.”
This seeing/looking takes us through the lives of three women – Aminda, Mercedes Zamora, & Elisa – from the novel Champú, or Hair Matters excerpted in this anthology. In Cantú’s particular mode of storytelling, which John-Michael Rivera in his introduction to her work describes as a “[conceptual] meld [of] autoethnographic technique with poststructuralist theories,” brings South Texas to life. Within each character’s story, many lives collide, celebrate, and pass each other through narrative as alive and charged as gossip and an unexpected phone call. Laredo becomes as rich as one’s own palm; lifelines cross each in their individual streaks but hold together as a resonant whole. An example of this kind of engaging narrative comes in this short passage from Aminda’s story in which she recounts her reaction to running into a medical intuitive:
Pues to make a long story short, I was intrigued and scheduled a session with the medical intuitive. It was intense. After six hours in session, I was exhausted. I cried and laughed and felt elated and full of life. She says we can heal ourselves (48).
This passage shows how Cantú mixes formal choices and an openness of voice to create a narrative that is engaging, direct, and real. This passage is also a favorite moment of mine because of how close this kind of narrative takes the reader into the thinking of the character. I found myself able to read the words She says we can heal ourselves both for what they say within the story’s context but also what they say about the spirit of this anthology. Angels provides example after example of how we as writers can heal ourselves by taking on the cultural and literary landscapes within and without.
Stop 3: Edwin Torres
Travel on the back of a poet in flight – the conjured modalities among a century’s search is where answers shapeshift among the alphabets. (294)
These words, taken from Edwin Torres’ own aesthetic statement, are a good place to round out this short ride through this anthology. With its focus on new Latin@ writing, Angels of the Americlypse offers the opportunity to do just what Torres suggests in this sentence: that we “travel” with this group of writers, experience some of the “century’s search” and be witness to “answers” as they “shapeshift among the alphabets.” The following three stanzas, drawn from Torres’ poem “ME NO HABLA SPIC,” tie together and evoke this anthology’s fascination with temporal and cultural reality, how both shape each other, “unerasing” and “reinscribing” who we are along the way:
i remember one afternoon in soho
sitting on the sidewalk
with my long-haired cat harry
single and care-free
showing my beautiful pet to the world
people passing by, saying
what a cute spic
…
i remember reading every email i sent
to feel as if i were the person
receiving my own words, basking in their clever reach
to feel the warmth of many messages
from many people, all of them me
a conglomerate of sinewy desperation
wrapped up in the viral opportunity of a cute spic
…
i remember sitting in soho
with my two-year old son
surrounded by expensive buildings
where there used to be none, the world passing
me, just thankful to get some rest
in the sun’s imperfections, the people
ooh’ing and ahh’ing, what a cute spic (273-279)
By bringing together some of the most exciting work being written today along with the thoughts and conversations behind them, Angels of the Americlypse stands as an essential and illuminating anthology.
Available from Counterpath Press for $35.
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and winner of Rhino Poetry’s 2015 Editor’s Prize. He has had poems recently in Poet Lore, Borderlands, and The Laurel Review. He is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati. Reasons (not) to Dance, a chapbook of flash fiction/prose poems, is forthcoming this summer from FutureCycle Press. He runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence.
Written by sallymccallum Posted in Jose Angel Araguz, Review Tagged with anthology, Carmen Giménez Smith, John Chávez, Jose Angel Araguz, latin@ poetry, Rosa Alcalá
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'Angels of the Americlypse'
A fugue reading by Rosa Alcalá, Carmen Giménez Smith, Roberto Tejada, and Rodrigo Toscano
David Colón
On the evening of October 28th, 2015, Rosa Alcalá, Carmen Giménez Smith, Roberto Tejada, and Rodrigo Toscano gave a collaborative performance of their work in the Eck Visitors Center at the University of Notre Dame. The reading was part of a two-day program, “Angels of the Americlypse: readings and colloquia — new Latin@ poetries and literary translation” organized by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative (directed by Francisco Aragón) of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, in collaboration with Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program.
The event was live-streamed online; the video recording is available through YouTube and the audio recording is archived through the University of Notre Dame; an official press release for the event can be read here.
The performance takes the form, as the poets have called it, of a “fugue reading.” Every few minutes a different poet takes to the podium to read, which is familiar enough (for example, two years ago at TCU where I teach, Adam Clay, Ada Limón, and Michael Robins gave a wonderful polyvocal reading in our Live Oak Reading Series with a similar pass-the-mic format): but the analogy of a fugue is more apt than describing the Angels of the Americlypse collaborative reading as either “hierarchical” or “dialogic,” [1] as would be more common.Rodrigo Toscano opens the reading with the line, “The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care,” and each time he returns to the lectern to read — twelve times in all, including the group’s first and last turns — he repeats this line, subsequently riffing off of it to explore different aspects and potentialities. These poems come from his forthcoming book, Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016), a collection of eighty poems all expanding from this single line, a line referring to a real event that happened in Springfield, MA on November 23rd, 2012. [2] Considering the group’s performance as a fugue reading, I think Toscano’s line effectively establishes irony as the performance’s home key, if not its subject.
Carmen Giménez Smith, reading her “Ars Poetica” next after Toscano’s opening, develops the irony. Anaphoristic, each line stating an aspect of what her “I” is or is not (“I’m indifferent / I’m a disgrace / I’m funny / I’m assistance / I’m not saved / I was Mormon / I’m atheist // I’m mysterious / I’m scared / I’m head of household / I’m quick tempered / I’m day job / I’m night ghost / I’m a failure / I act white / I live bankrolled / I’m deliverable”), this confession is indignant, cynical, part apology and part F you. And through its anaphora, it reifies in itself a pattern of repetition that supports the fugal concept.
Giménez Smith’s anthology, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath, 2014), co-edited with John Chávez, is the source of this fugue reading’s name.[3] In their introduction, Giménez Smith and Chávez state that with this anthology, “we collectively question the anxious need to patrol the borders of our identities,” intending to “illuminate the blind-spots beyond these false borders,” [4] and to this end, irony serves its purpose. Rosa Alcalá reads her poem “Voice Activation” (starting at 32:12 of the video) in a manner that mimics the halting, flaccid tone of a computer-generated voice, undermining the tacit human perspective in the lines, “luckily I am a native speaker / Luckily I have no accent and you can understand perfectly what I am saying to you via this poem.” Roberto Tejada enters the reading/fugue last, one might say in an episodic role, and his voicing of “Tower, Hiroshima” (55:44), spacing out the lines with punctuating silences, links up to the formal leitmotif of the group performance.
As for final say on why irony, you can judge.
1. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 67.
2. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/11/24/springfield-explosion-injures-least-levels-strip-club/SX7MmBHvdfePUBkpyCgG6L/story.html.
3. Giménez Smith has included Alcalá, Tejada, and Toscano in the anthology.
4. Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez, eds., Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (Denver: Counterpath, 2014), xiii.
April 9, 2016
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