Channeling Curiosity Into Language: How a Diverse Array of Influences Feeds Poetic Development

I’m prone to being influenced. This sentence in the 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto” by Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade perfectly captures my disposition in this regard: “I am only interested in what is not mine.” My poetic sensibility has been shaped by a wild array of writers, from Gertrude Stein to John Ashbery and the New York School poets; from César Vallejo to Clarice Lispector and the Boom writers (Jorge Luis Borges in particular) to the conceptualists, from Latin America; and from the neo-Baroque poets to Laurie Anderson to language poetry to exophonic and multilingual writers. Yet it is my curiosity about things not poetry that has led to discoveries from which I’ve learned the most in terms of actually making something.

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

If you grew up in Mexico, were born or identified as female, had literary inclinations and an early instinct for the hypocrisy and double standards applying to all things gender-related, chances are you were influenced by the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz even before you had actually studied her. You learned almost by osmosis that, despite being a nun, she was everything but sanctimonious. That from an early age she held herself to the highest standards. That if she hadn’t achieved a self-imposed academic goal by a certain date, she’d cut off her hair, for she thought that one’s ignorant head wasn’t worth gracing with a luscious mane.

Knowledge of the sciences and of the arts, which her poetry found a way to convey and embody, was the only adornment worth aspiring to. Her countenance graced the 200 Mexican peso bill from 1994 to 2019 and, from 2020 on, is on the award-winning redesigned 100-peso bill (which incidentally devotes its backside to monarch butterflies).

While it might seem counterintuitive or patently unthinkable that a tenaciously patriarchal culture such as Mexico’s would venerate a woman writer, that she’s the still only one to have achieved such status in over four hundred years speaks precisely to the sempiternal quandary she identified women being trapped in. Poems such as the “Redondilla 92” that opens with her most quoted stanza put it succinctly: “Hombres necios que acusáis / a la mujer sin razón / sin ver que sois la ocasión / de lo mismo que culpáis.”

I learned that no matter how I got language on the page, I couldn’t not sound like myself.

Edith Grossman’s translation does away with the poem’s octosyllabic meter and abba rhyme scheme to channel its pugnacious tone and the ordered unfolding of its critique of macho illogic through chiasmus: “O foolish men who accuse / women with so little cause, / not seeing you are the reason / for the very thing you blame.” The poem ultimately arrives at the impossibility of female desire in a male-dominated society at odds with itself, where idealized female bodies are pursued relentlessly and then repudiated for not being pure or chaste enough. Their value can only be retained if it’s unsoiled by male desire through perpetual unattainability, yet this unattainability comes at a high, often violent price: “With foolish presumption you wish / to find the woman you seek, / for your mistress, a Thais, / and Lucretia for your wife.”

Neither courtesan nor martyred wife, Sor Juana might have been lesbian, yet what most left its mark on me was her queerness in relation to mainstream culture, a queerness that is palpable everywhere in her subversive writing. Her love poems are some of the most exquisite and restrainedly erotic poems I’ve ever read. Her embrace of the Nahuatl language and her questioning of all forms of colonial authority continue to ignite defiance.

Her writing asserts what it leaves unsaid and probes the space between the sayable and unsayable, the known and the unknown, in a way that’s nothing short of miraculous. The Baroque, conceptual rigor of her Primero Sueño (First Dream) remains unsurpassed: “Piramidal, funesta de la tierra / nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba / de vanos obeliscos punta altiva, / escalar pretendiendo las estrellas.” In Grossman’s rendering, the opening reads: “Pyramidal, funereal, a shadow / born of earth, aspiring to highest heaven, the haughty tip of its great obelisks / striving in vain to climb up to the stars.”

I could never aspire to Sor Juana’s heights, since I lacked her discipline and was too interested in the street life of Mexico City to cloister myself at home. I can’t say I wrote much in her vein with the exception of some early poems in Spanish, a handful of which appear in my first book, Acúfenos (2006). They sound learned and Baroque because of their mock elevated diction and unexpected juxtapositions, but their humor is ironic and somewhat postmodern in their collapsing of high and low. In the same poem I might insert a reference to a laparoscopy, “the taciturn fluidity of mornings,” regressive tendencies, and front-wheel drives, for instance.

Cabaret Político

Every new generation of readers spawns new readings of Sor Juana, whose irreducible work plays a role similar to Emily Dickinson’s in the United States. One of my favorite reinterpretations, in the early 1990s, was through actors/feminist activists/icons Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe’s political cabaret El Hábito in Mexico City. Jesusa would dress up as Sor Juana and speak truth to power in meter and rhyme. I had dabbled in acting in high school and as a poli-sci major in college before I decided to devote myself primarily to writing. I was a pretty self-conscious actor and wasn’t interested in naturalism, so discovering political cabaret was a revelation, since it married many of my interests: irreverence, political satire, writing, improvisation, and activist art. In Dada fashion, it created a space for the audience to become a community through shared acknowledgment of the world’s absurdity.

Around that time, my friend Carlos and I enrolled in a short cabaret course with another icon in the cabaret world, Tito Vasconcelos, at a performance space he’d recently opened, El Bugambilia. We’d seen an ad in the newspaper and applied on a whim. There we were a few weeks later working on a nativity play in which I would play a strident Satan in the guise of a nefarious union leader who was part of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s inner circle. We’d fold the news into the play at the pace at which it was unfolding in real time; the challenge of finding the art in the mess of everyday life somehow didn’t feel too challenging. The messier the mess, the better. The aesthetic was maximalist; everything could be brought in, disparateness ruled.

Those were heady times: the 1985 earthquake and the AIDS crisis had galvanized social-justice and pro-democracy movements, and the party that had been in power for more than seventy years, the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (PRI), was in a death spiral. Local rock bands were thriving in a less politically repressive environment (and were later promoted by MTV Latino). Music clubs were popping up everywhere and artists were taking over near-condemned buildings downtown (i.e., the Balmori building in Colonia Roma, now, predictably, a rooftop bar). There was an energy in the underground live arts world that I found intoxicating, but it would take me years to apply some of that iconoclastic drive to my own writing.

Oulipo: “Rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” (Raymond Queneau)

Moving to New York in 1993 to get an MFA in poetry set me back, given that I started writing in English, which I’d never before done. I decided it was better than translating myself yet finding my way in such a radically new medium of composition took me quite a bit of time. Two encounters proved vital; had I not had them, I might have languished.

One was the work of the mostly French group of writers who in 1960 formed Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) with the express purpose of reclaiming and inventing constraint-based writing methods that would expand the formal possibilities for literature exponentially, beyond the limited repertoire that poets, in particular, kept associating with the genre. I was already an enthusiastic reader of the novels of Italo Calvino, one of the movement’s members, and they claimed Jorge Luis Borges as an “anticipatory plagiarist” for proposing that literature was a combinatory art derived from the application of a finite number of formulas and structures.

Shortly after I met painter Bruce Pearson, who later became my husband, he gave me a copy of the Oulipo Compendium from Atlas Press’s Documents of the Avant-Garde series. It was exactly what I needed to take the pressure off my writing, focus on language more as material than as vehicle of expression, and play with words for sustained periods of time. I learned that no matter how I got language on the page, I couldn’t not sound like myself, and that meaning was something to discover in the process of making a work and sharing it, not something I needed to prefigure.

Why make something if I’d already figured it out? And why keep trying to write sonnets, sestinas, and the like when I could write elementary moralities, for instance, or come up with a new form? (An elementary morality is made of a set number of pairs of adjectives and nouns with a brief interlude in the middle, and was invented by Oulipo cofounder and renegade Surrealist, Raymond Queneau.) Better yet, if I ran out of ideas or I’d written something I wasn’t happy with and kept hitting a wall trying to revise it, I could charge it with the unexpected and give it a critical edge by resorting to the N+7 formula, substituting every noun in the treated passage with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary of one’s choosing.

Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) was a powerful example of what could be achieved by adapting Oulipian methods to an American context. My first book in English, Talk Shows (2006), contains a number of Oulipian poems, among them a couple of elementary moralities; “Bankrupt Books: A Collage,” an antonymic translation of the titles from a New York Times bestseller list; and a long piece, “Texas,” which is a disordered abecedarium containing both a prose paragraph and a single-stanza poem containing only words starting with a given letter for each letter of the alphabet.

I could use my two languages in poems and performance works that, like theirs, explored their relationship and challenged the ways in which work in another language was conventionally received.

Segue Reading Series: Triple Happiness

Just as I was starting to feel looser writing in English, paradoxically through coming up with ideas for constraint-based pieces, I discovered a reading series that presented me with an entire new avenue of creative investigation: the Segue Reading Series. Devoted to showcasing a range of approaches to experimental writing, it was founded by James Sherry, editor of Roof Books, and has run continuously for the past forty years plus.

Back in the late 1990s, it took place at a bar in Chinatown called Double Happiness. That’s where I first saw an electrifying performance by Cecilia Vicuña, and later heard Edwin Torres and Rodrigo Toscano deliver poems in ways I’d never encountered before. It was a triple jolt to the system to witness the different ways in which each brought together Spanish and English. Instead of keeping them separate, as I had been doing so as to not “alienate” my readers (at the expense of alienating myself ), I could use my two languages in poems and performance works that, like theirs, explored their relationship and challenged the ways in which work in another language was conventionally received.

Amping up potential misunderstandings, code-switching performatively, and tapping into the sonic possibilities that rubbing the two languages together opened was an alternative to the conventional forms of reading the work to a live audience that had felt unproductively constraining to me. I was neither a page poet nor a spoken word poet, much as I appreciated some of the work done in both camps. The options were endless and I simply didn’t understand why everyone kept falling back on received modes, none more “natural” than the other, and both equally theatricalized.

On the page, Vicuña’s and Torres’s compositions dwell in a liminal space straddling visual art, poetry, and performance scores; in particular, I was struck by Vicuña’s Instan (2002). My experiments with bilingualism and self-translation began there and led to my book, Repetition Nineteen (2020), but the book that owes the most to what I learned from the community of poets gathered around the series (David Antin and Kim Rosenfield in particular come to mind) is my second in English: Public Domain (2008). It includes vocal pieces such as the sequence “Imperfect Utterances” that contains a bilingual piece for a primarily monolingual audience titled “Cease to Stutter, Singsong.” It is made up of words containing exclusively the syllables “si” and “no.” Also in the book is “The March Papers,” a polyvocal performance piece made up of found language from the “Letters to the Editor” section of the New York Times published during the Iraq War.

Riffing off off-off Broadway theater

Which takes us back to the performing arts world. The first Wooster Group performance I ever saw was The Hairy Ape on Broadway in 1997. Its riotousness blew my mind. Even though I’d never quite seen anything quite like it, I sensed a continuity with the work I’d done in Mexico in terms of its radical takedown of theatrical conventions. I began following experimental theater on and off, and over two decades later saw the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet at The Kitchen in 2009. That was another aha! moment for me: What? You could transcribe people’s disjointed memories of one of Shakespeare’s most popular works and weave them together into a play? Seriously?

I wanted to tap into that collaborative, nonprecious way of making work that involved filtering the energy radiating from chance encounters, randomness, and error into texts. I coveted the radical presentness of performance. I wanted to provoke and prompt the audience to respond in ways that were less about admiring virtuosity and talent (a model I continue to find deeply limiting) and more about harnessing cacophony and mirroring and refracting my own and the audience’s interactions and experience of language overall. I had a slight problem, though. Pequeño detalle. I was a poet, not a playwright or director. I just wanted to write and needed to avoid getting bogged down by all the logistical details of a production. What to do?

I was experiencing this type of creative restlessness when I encountered an installation by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End to Kafka’s ‘Amerika’, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on a visit with my mother in 2009. It consisted of a massive hodgepodge of mismatched chairs, tables, and desks set up for job interviews conducted by the fictional company the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (from which the real New York City-based company took their name) in Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika. As we were taking it in, I turned to my mom and said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to write the dialogue for each one of these arrangements?” I didn’t know I was sealing my fate for the next few years then and there.

I resorted to a loose Oulipian constraint: to write a book-length piece set in a job fair that could be read as a hybrid book of poetry or performed as a play by one person or many, that wove in allusions to Amerika, and for which I’d research specific design elements about the furniture on display (from Eames chairs to a bean bag chair) so that they’d inform the dialogues taking place in the midst of the job fair. What good is a constraint if you can’t break it at some point? I eventually had to, because without an inventory of all the components in the installation, it proved impossible to identify each of the furniture pieces in it. I also realized that my allegiance and loyalty to Kippenberger’s installation was not necessary in the least. He even claimed he’d never read Kafka’s book—not before or after working on his piece!

Translation is what it comes down to

Ekphrasis. Internalizing a work that speaks to you as you read it and through which you speak in dialoguing with it. Activating a text in a reading or performance, bringing to it an undisputed element of aliveness as it travels through the body and out into the room. Games. Process. Play. Envisioning how a set of rules can give shape to a work that you won’t know until you’re done following them. Once the work manifests the rules are forgotten.

Call me promiscuous. I only exist in dialogue; dialogue shapes me. There’s no end to the shaping. Enter translation and César Vallejo’s call to refuse binaries and one-to-one correspondence in “Trilce XXXVI,” “Rehusad, y vosotros, a posar las plantas / en la seguridad dupla de la Armonía. / Rehusad la simetría a buen seguro.” “Refuse, and you as well, to set foot / on the twofold security of Harmony. / Refuse symmetry for sure,” read these lines in my translation of the poem in Repetition Nineteen. Enter Jack Spicer’s After Lorca. Enter bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire. Enter Juan Luis Martínez’s La nueva novela. Enter Ulises Carrión. English not necessary. On the page the dead live as much as the living. All are welcome.

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Excerpted from Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright © 2024.