"[M]y memory is the mother of my poetry.": William Archila on S is For

Interview by Brent Ameneyro

Brent Ameneyro (BA): I first encountered your work when I read The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, which won the 2013 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. I think it’s only fitting that we continue the Archila-Letras Latinas relationship by featuring you on Letras Latinas Blog 2 to celebrate the release of your latest collection, S is For, winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. I can see many parallels between these two books; a continuation of a lifelong obsession, perhaps. In addition to some formal variation, this new collection feels like it leaps into new territory, but within the same realm. Your voice is strong, and there’s a clear thread between all of your work. Is your obsession driven by some unknowable force or is it a concerted effort? Are you intentionally trying to work through something and these poems are all a consequence of that work? Or are you writing without inhibition and your subconscious is driving you toward this particular universe of ideas?

William Archila (WA): I’m a very impulsive writer. I write what’s around me, what captures my imagination, what fills my body. Basically I’m just fiddling with words. I don’t have a plan most of the time. I'm just working myself through the lines till I get to a place where I'm happy with what I’ve written. I am never entirely aware of what I’m doing. I don’t sit down with a theme in mind and say to myself I want to write a poem about Central American boys. I write about the things I know, the things that surround me and move me, the things that capture my imagination. This process might be perceived as a deficiency, but I like to be surprised about what’s the next poem and how it is about to unfold. I like the mystery of it, the unfinished side of things, like a good punk song, the riffs that come across the page, and like a musician, I sit down and play it over and over until I hear something. That’s why I sometimes enjoy reading a John Berryman or John Ashbury poem. There’s joy in mystery.

But I see what you mean. There is a lifelong obsession about where I come from and it might be because that’s what I know. It might be because it was taken away too soon or maybe because when I was a child that’s when the artist in me was most alive, but that’s a different and much too long a story to discuss here. My poems are a connection to a time and place. The places in my poems have shaped me and so they appear on the page. I have also shaped these poems, and in that sense, my memory is the mother of my poetry.

However, this time around with S is For, I tried different approaches to generate content. First I tried writing my impulses in form and then dismantling them. I wrote in form to get myself on the page and then when I found a voice I went with it and disregarded the rigidity of the form. It didn’t always work, but it got my imagination up and running. I also stopped reading and writing for meaning. I was reading my work the way that I was taught in school, but with poetry so much happens within one word to the next, within lines, with sound and rhythm that the idea of reading for meaning was not helping me. So I had to let go of that and trust the poem in what it was doing, what it was asking of me. I also had to trust myself. I had to trust that my memory would give me what was worthwhile saving. I think my memory knows more about me than I do. So instead, I started having an experience with language, and that disjointed experience appeared to be more human. Forcing sense into the poems was not helping. Instead I let the poem dictate. I started listening to the sounds as if I was listening to a song. I don’t always analyze music when I go to a concert. I don’t find myself thinking why a bridge here and not there. In the same manner I didn’t think about why this image and not this other image. I just trusted my memory and my association and in the process enjoyed the sounds. In that sense the poems became units of sound, not necessarily units of meaning, and El Salvador became a homeland of the mind, not a real one.

BA: When I was researching the history of prose poetry, I found arguments that claimed the bible contains the first examples of prose poems. You don’t use prose poetry in this collection, but I’m trying to make a point about discussing the bible as literature. You use the word God quite a bit, and there is a fair amount of religious imagery in the collection. Do you allude to biblical ideas the way you reference, say, Shakespeare? Is your inclusion of God more of a literary device or is it part of a spiritual quest? Or both? Or something else entirely?

WA: That’s ironic that you mention the fact that I don’t use prose poems in this collection because that’s the form I’m working on now beside my disheveled sonnets. But I hear what you’re saying about the word God. That’s very interesting. I guess God permeates my work because I was raised Catholic and attended the church at least twice a week for the first nine years of my life. I also attended a Catholic school up to the third grade. My early years were filled with people whose every other word or phrase praised the glory of God, but I’m not writing for the blessing of God. I mean I am most likely writing for a god who speaks my language. In that light the word god is both a literary device and a spiritual quest, but my spiritual quest lies in a different kind of god, one outside the Bible. In this collection I approach God as sarcasm, as fear, as a threatening and oppressive representative of the dominant ideology. God as a badge, God as a bomb, a politician who is indifferent, a creator who abandoned us and left us to govern ourselves. It feels more dangerous for me to name God than to conjure a demon. It is God as the instrument of fear we have created for ourselves, and sometimes it is the God I met in the church, but I want a different god. My god is a migrant with a ladder at the border. My god practices soliloquies in the dark when everyone’s gone. My god has been waiting in line for centuries to get into history. There is a god in all of us. He or she is an outsider, a foreigner, and a dangerous immigrant. Like the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the church, but you cannot take the church out of the boy.

BA: Nature interjects itself into your work, but not in the typical transcendental sense. I feel that nature, like your use of God, adds a layer of objectivity to your poetry. I see three layers of time in your work: present, past, and omniscient. The sky, clouds, birds, and deer appear as if outside of the horrors of humanity, outside of our linear perspective of time, as if they are watching us destroy ourselves. Can you speak to your use of nature imagery in your work? Can you also speak to the way you move through time?

WA: That’s right. Nature is a type of witness to our self-destruction and it interjects my work just like God or death interjects my work, sometimes by lowering its head, sometimes by hissing or foaming at the mouth. It is what surrounds me and what I know. Before leaving El Salvador, I lived in the outskirts of Santa Ana, a very rural area where I was left alone to wander the fields, streams, Ceiba trees and the mountains that bordered the neighborhood. It was a quiet place where I could go and be in my own solitude and think out loud without danger or being judged. It was most likely the place that first listened to my consciousness begin to form a point of view. So I always upheld nature as a sacred place that needs to be honored and respected and in my work, I believe, it is doing exactly that, listening and witnessing in disappointment to our failures and horrors.

At first, early in my writing, I was afraid of relying too much on nature imagery because I was afraid to be labeled a nature poet. I had a lot of silly fears back then, but soon, after two books, I realized that nature could be an agent to my experience, one that expresses and at the same time be indifferent to our suffering.

Now this question about my movements through time, I believe, are informed by death. At the crux of my work is this idea of death, the idea that time is passing and things like a forest or the people we love are passing. The moment we are born we are passing. Therefore you want to leave some kind of record of what it feels like to be part of this life, what it feels to be aware of those things you love, this time and residence on earth. Death is the mother of beauty, right? That’s how we know things are passing. In that sense, time is death and birth, time and rebirth.

BA: The opening lines of the poem “Spanish Lesson with a Handful of Dirt” read: You can always claim your roots in a country once you bury the dead or is it your dead will claim you always once you bury your country. These lines, for me, capture the essence of the collection. All the elements are here in these four lines: the disorienting nature of leaving a war-torn country, the questions of identity, the sense of loss, the grief and mourning. Is there one poem or lines from a poem that you see as the “heart” of the collection?

WA: You’re not the only one who has focused on those lines. And you are correct, they hold the essence of the collection. I was allowing myself to riff on the act of burying the dead and what it means in relation to one’s roots and country, and in the process, I arrived at these phrases you focus on, which is this idea about what makes a homeland, and it seems to me that you cannot claim a country as your homeland unless you bury a family member in that country. The moment we bury one of our family members, that’s when we plant roots. And this is a question that I’m always asking myself, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, what is a homeland?

Also, by burying, I’m getting into the idea of forgetting one's country roots, leaving them behind, but also, and more importantly, how my roots will bury me, meaning my roots will forget me. At the same time, the act of burying lends itself to the act of embracing, as in going back to the soil, going back to one’s roots, and in that manner, the roots and the soil will embrace you to complete a circle of life.

But to answer your question more directly, another moment in the collection where I hear the heart beating is in the opening lines to the poem “Double.”

There used to be a Salvadorean

boy inside this body. And if this isn’t enough he has come back

to tell me it’s impossible

to get rid of him, like the year

his father split when he was nine

stranded in the outskirts of some

fictitious town, with nowhere to go

These lines cover the idea of leaving my country and roots behind as well, but also the idea of the country, the roots or ancestry, here in the shape of my father, leaving me behind. The idea of abandonment is one embedded in the history of El Salvador. So many children are born out of wedlock, not knowing who their father is, from colonial times to the war-torn country of the civil war. At the same time, there is no way to get rid of this baggage, unless you reinvent yourself, and that’s one of the options that every Salvadorean in their exile encounters. The idea of reinventing yourself with a new identity, one from here and from there, from a liminal space, meaning always in transition, always changing, always active, in the present, in the moment, but not forgetting.

BA: I’d like to end on something personal, if you don’t mind. Your wife is the lovely, talented poet Lory Bedikian. There are several talented poet couples I can think of off the top of my head: Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, John Murillo and Nicole Sealey, Mai Der Vang and Anthony Cody, and our very own Laura Villareal and Alfredo Aguilar. What are the benefits and the challenges that come with having a poet-partner? Practically speaking, do you share or alternate writing time? And lastly, to close out with some beauty, can you either name your favorite poem by Lory or quote your favorite line of hers?

WA: Oh, it's the worst being married to a poet. She is always jealous of all my successes. She’s always competing with me. Naw, I’m just kidding. That statement is 100% false. I must say though she’s written all of my poems. That statement is almost 100% true. I’m just kidding again.

Honestly, it’s a great benefit having a poet-partner. We help each other with our work. I mean, we write in our own solitude, and then we show each other our finished drafts. She’s an amazing editor. We also have great conversations about writing and reading and teaching, so much that it feels like we’re doing our very own podcast.

I guess there has been some kind of competition, but it’s a healthy one because our successes challenge us to write better. We have worked out a method where we don’t let each other’s successes and failures interrupt our relationship. However, in the beginning, sometimes it was challenging because when we received news from our submissions or grants, sometimes one of us got accepted and the other one got rejected. So whoever got accepted could never be extremely happy because someone else got rejected and the one who got rejected could not be really happy for the other person who got accepted because they just got rejected. Now, it’s all different. We try not to let that bother us. We understand that publishing is driven by taste and market trends and every so often we have to remind ourselves. We have come to realize that it’s the art of writing that matters and how the act itself is shaping us for a better self and a better future. Publishing is flattering, but the feeling only lasts for so long. It’s our feelings about our writing that matters. It’s our feelings about our work that endures.

And to close with some beauty, I will say that there are so many of her poems that are my favorites, but since her book Jagadakeer: Apology to the body just came out, I’m going to say “Longevity: part pseudo-memoir, part commentary” is one of my favorites, which includes a line I wish I had written: “Show me a death that is a complete sentence.”

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Latino Poetry The library of America Anthology, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He is an associate editor of Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. He has work forthcoming in Ploughshares.

Brent Ameneyro is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). He was the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as an associate at Letras Latinas and as the Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review.