Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of On This Side of the Desert (Kent State University Press 2020), selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What Happens On Earth (BOAAT Press 2018). He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Best New Poets 2017, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Originally from North County San Diego, he now resides in Central Texas.
You mention in your biography (on your website) that you are the son of Mexican immigrants. Did this identity, in any way, draw you into the written world?
I think my identity informs an impulse in my work to create a familial history/memory where I could not find one. I think early on I had a strong desire, even need, to have a story or stories that could tell me who I was and who I came from. I felt I couldn’t find this in any literature, other than maybe the oral stories passed around by family, but even then it didn’t really account for our lives in the United States. I wanted to write something that could help me discover who I was, who and where I come from, and make sense of the particular space I occupy in the world.
On that note, the majority of your poems seem to explore spatial and temporal landscapes as well as boundaries. Why is this of interest or significance to you?
This mostly has to do with my growing up in a secluded home nestled in a valley with mountains surrounding us on all sides. Many mornings while the sky was turning, the sun would rise slowly over the mountains and spill over in rays of red, orange, and gold. There were times I would spend just walking around, sitting on the grass, and looking at the mountains and trees. Exploring those landscapes both literally and in writing is a way of grounding myself in a place, in my body and breath, and perhaps even in the poem.
You are the author of two poetry collections: On This Side of the Desert and What Happens On Earth. On the surface, they seem to be two different collections, the former being an interaction between your Mexican heritage and cultures, and the latter composed of sonnets that call out to the political climate of our modern world. Despite these seeming differences, do these collections speak to or build off of each other in any way?
I don’t think they necessarily have much do with one another; each of them strikes me as distinctly different. I looked them both over recently and felt like a different person wrote each. I believe that’s a good feeling though. I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps one of my goals as a writer is to write as though the pervious book I’d written was lost in a fire and then I was tasked to continue writing. It’s a little dramatic, but the idea is to put myself in a space creatively where there is no previous book, where maybe it shadow exists but it doesn’t impede what comes next.
I was captivated by so many of your poems in various online literary journals. An all-time favorite of mine is MY FATHER HAS ME HOLD A HEN (Redivider). In this one as much as any other poem, you show a beautiful precision in diction and imagery. A lot of your poetic language seems to oscillate between abstract sentimentality and an authentic clarity. What roles do diction and imagery play in your poems?
Both of those aspects are important to me. I’m often thinking about the music of language, how things sound when read aloud, and tinkering with it until I’m satisfied. I am a relentless tinkerer; I’m always trying to make sure that the language sounds right to me. Imagery also plays a big role for me. I think there is a way to write an image and imbue it with a deep sense of emotion—or to put it another way I think there is a way to write the image so that it can be a container for an emotion, and emotion is crucial for me. Much of that is built through word choice and context. I think that my particular focus on that might have to do with having studied a bit of film and its language of images.
Your poems often take shape in couplets. Is this act deliberate or subconscious? Do you find poetic structure to be liberating or restrictive?
I think in the drafting of the poem the shape is a bit unconscious. In revising I often play with how the poem looks on the page and think about how line breaks and space are speaking to the poem’s content. I think that for me settling on a form or how a poem looks on the page is fairly deliberate.
I’ve found that structure can be both. I think that a structure can give you something to push up against and that can be fairly serendipitous. You can find yourself writing something and noticing it adheres in some way to a form, write towards that, and find that it fits quite nicely. On the other hand I’ve found that a strict structure can at times get in the way, but usually yields at least something I wouldn’t have written otherwise. I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of trying to write a poem I might lack the skill or courage to write. Perhaps, at the very least, structure is a way of pushing yourself to grow in ways you may not have expected.
Tell us a bit about your writing, editing, and submitting process. Do you abide by certain routines or is the process spontaneous?
For a while I did have something of a routine, where I’d come home from work and sit down to write at some point in the evening. As of late I don’t really have a routine; this year has been so heart-rending and I’ve had a hard time focusing. My writing is more spontaneous now, just because I’m really trying to listen to what feels important for me to speak/write. I’m also just trying to be kinder to myself. As far as editing I’ve usually spent like maybe a week or so looking a poem over and then putting it away and moving onto another poem. When making packets for sending work out I review the poems and revise if I feel the poems need it (they usually do). For submitting I tend to focus on journals where I can see my own work fitting in. I do tend to submit to a few places at once but it’s not very many.
Is there anything you’re working on at the moment? This could be writing or something completely different.
I’m really just trying to listen and make space for when the next poem tells me it needs to be written. I’m trying to not be so hard on myself if I don’t write for a period of time. I’m also trying to get back into playing guitar a bit more. Having another creative outlet where what’s being made isn’t going to be presented to people is kind of freeing. I feel like it feeds back into my writing in some way; music opens paths where sometimes language can follow.
Why write poetry and not prose?
This is such a timely question! I was recently writing what I thought might be prose but it ended up being a poem. I think poetry comes to me far more naturally than prose does. I feel like part of it may have something to do with endurance; I can’t really keep my head wrapped around a thing I’m writing about for too long in terms of the number of words or pages. If there are too many words, what I had in mind tends to get away from me. Another big part of it is that I spent a lot of my youth learning and playing songs on guitar. That practice really informs the way I think about the music in language and using only a few words to build something. There’s a fairly thin line between song and poetry, so when I began writing poems at the encouragement of poet friends who knew I played songs, it felt like a natural branching out of what I was already doing.
Finally, what is one piece of advice you’d give to emerging writers, especially those with underrepresented or overlooked backgrounds?
Tell your story the way you need to tell it. Don’t worry if other people don’t “get it.” Write for yourself and for the people dear to you. Read your work out loud; notice how the words feel and sound as they pass from your body into the air. Read other’s work as generously as you’d like your own work to be read. Be gentle with yourself.
Interviewed by Jessica Kim, edited by Lou Willmott.