Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
R. A. Villanueva is a Brooklyn-based poet, educator and editor whose book Reliquaria has been highly praised. A senior language lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and a founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he has won many awards for his work, such as the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for Poetry. He has also secured fellowships from Kundiman and The Asian American Literary Review, and scholarships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
Villanueva’s poetry has been described as “vivid and deeply lived” by Idra Novey, author of Exit, Civilian, and he has been praised for his “precise yet lush language” by Paisley Rekdal, author of Animal Eye. Now away from New York, teaching and writing in London, Villanueva tells Joy Francis that he isn’t comfortable with the notion of a “poetry scene”, explains why he focuses on mortality, death and dying in his work, and reveals his excitement at the new generation of British poetry collectives.
What are you doing in London?
My wife took a post in London and I took the opportunity to join her. Also my first book came out last September in the US and for the first time in my life, I had a united body of work to carry around; something portable. Before then, I had poems scattered across journals and literary magazines. I did wonder how my poems would be received over here. I didn’t know what to expect, but that was another reason why we decided to move to London. It was a liberating kind of danger.
What have you noticed about the cultural differences with poets here?
When you go to a new place, the lexicon is different and the names for how one identifies is different. I’ve had frank discussions with writers of colour about being Black British and with people from other Commonwealth countries about how they identify themselves. Each name is a badge, banner and a burden, all at the same time. It’s different from how people in the US identify. I see myself as Filipino American (and my poems are tied to that understanding), but that phrasing doesn’t translate exactly to all parts of the world.
How does the poetry scene in London compare with New York?
I’ve been asked this question many times. I don’t want to feel like a representative, or like an ambassador from Brooklyn. My answer will most likely change if I’m asked again. With all that being said, what I’ve realised is that in the US right now, identity politics, or a confrontation with what it means to be an American – especially as a black American or African American or a person of colour – these things are at the forefront of the poetry I’ve been responding to and that’s moved me. It feels like there is something really vital about how people are confronting and not holding back, and not being afraid to speak out about what scares them and what empowers them in – and about – America. What is also beautiful is that this isn’t an isolated experience. These writers are calling upon our traditions and our collective history and consciousness; things our predecessors and precursors have been saying and calling our attention to for a long while. This is important to the state of contemporary poetry right now and exceeds the poetry ‘scene. You have collections such as Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s This Way to the Sugar, Morgan Parker’s Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me up at Night, Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise and others dealing openly with race, class and gender. Books like these also exist in the UK, but there is a remarkable ferocity in what is being written in the US right now.
What ideas and themes drive your work?
My book [Reliquaria] is obsessed with mortality and wants to understand how knowing things end enlightens and informs the beauty we make while alive. That is to say, it deals with death and the dying and the sacredness of life and the temporary. It is, I imagine, also very much troubled by how we spend our time while we are here. There is a lot of history in the book: the history of colonialism, personal history, and how we resolve a faith that there is something else after we pass. I grew up Catholic, so that’s there too, in all of its joy and sorrow, its ritual and its hollowness.
Who are your favourite British poets?
For right now: Alice Oswald is one; another is Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose first book Terror took the breath out of me. I also admire Helen Mort and Inua Ellams very much. I don’t like the word ‘scene’, but there’s an abundance of exciting poetry collectives here, crossing and challenging each other, which reminds me of how it felt a decade ago in New York. I have been deeply impressed by Burn After Reading [BARPo], a group of younger poets mentored by Jacob Sam-La Rose and Jasmine Cooray. Whether we’re talking about these poets’ individual accomplishments or their monthly reading series, I’m consistently in awe of this community.
What or who got you into poetry?
I started responding to poetry and finding great intellectual satisfaction from it when I was in high school. My encounters with poetry were rooted in the timelessness of the work and the architecture of the poems. I would sit in the classroom in 1992 and we would be talking about work made in 1695, still deriving meaning, still able to find new things in the shape and the arrangement of those words. All through high school that was so vivifying to me. I didn’t venture into poetry beyond assignments until university, when I went to poetry slams and spoken word events. It was a whole different universe of sensibilities and poetics colliding with what I thought I knew.
What can you reveal about your creative/writing process? A lot of poets I’ve interviewed stress the importance of continuous learning and reading.
I think anyone who says that reading isn’t a part of the process is a bit shallow in their sense of what it means to be a writer. One needs to feel perpetually humbled and the only way to ‘improve’ is to read those who are greater than you – to surround yourself with writers who seem to say exactly what they want to say. Or, put another way, it’s imperative that you continually expose yourself to work that devastates you because it’s able to capture something about discrete experiences and our collective worries, needs, concerns and hopes. My [writing] process is slow, especially when I compare myself to others who seem more prolific. When people ask, How is your work going? they are often imagining you being in a room, typing away. In contrast, perhaps, my sense of writing involves being in the world with a notebook or mobile phone taking notes, or going to a reading or event and sitting, writing down phrases. It’s sketch-driven.
What are you currently working on, and what’s next for you?
I’ve been writing arrays of sonnets. I think that’s because there is something about them that is in sync with what I need from the world. There are rules and regulations that have been in place for 600 plus years. At the same time there are these other writers of colour who are enlivening the tradition. I’ve taken their cue. As if those rules aren’t meant to be broken, exactly, but innovated. It’s my responsibility to fill that skeleton framework with a circulatory system. There are already quite a few sonnets in Reliquaria, but in the aftermath of the book, I’ve taken to Twitter as a medium, thinking out in terms of eight syllable lines (as they fit more neatly within the 140-character count) and seven couplet feeds. I’m drawn to the intoxication and play of adding one more constraint upon an already constraint-rich form, of innovating these forms and toying with them.
Find out more about R. A. Villanueva: caesura.nu
Read Villanueva’s poem Archipelagic.
[toggle title=” Read an extract from Villanueva’s poem Archipelagic.”]
Not vinegar. Not acid. Not
sugarcane pressed to mortar by
fist, but salt: salt, the home taste; salt,
the tide; salt, the blood. Not Holy
Ghost, but a saint of coral come
to life in the night crossing a
field of brambles and thorns, the camps
of irates beat back to the bay
with hornets. Not Santo Niño.
And not a belt of storms, but this:
girls singing, an avocado
in each open palm, courting doves;
a moth drawn to the light of our
room you take to be your father.
©Copyright R.A. Villanueva 2015/ Originally published by The Academy of American Poets. [/toggle]