An Interview with Jesús Castillo
There are poetry collections that linger long after we have read them, that move us in ways we can’t quite find the words for, and that serve as reminders for what drew us to poetry in the first place. Each page of Jesús Castillo’s new poetry collection, Two Murals (The Song Cave, 2021), does just that. Divided into two sections, “Variations on Adonis” and “A Mural After Darwish,” the book leads readers through landscapes ripe with personal reflection, political history, and feelings of uncertainty that prompt further questions about the role we play in this world. While answers are as scarce as some of the surroundings Castillo depicts, we at least come to accept the inevitability of navigating life’s constant mazes.
In addition to Two Murals, Castillo is the author of Remains (McSweeney’s, 2016). He has received fellowships from the University of Iowa, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Tasajillo Writer’s Residency. His poems have appeared in the Boston Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series, the Porter House Review, and other publications. He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Esteban Rodriguez: Thank you, Jesús, for sitting down and talking with me. To start, your second collection, Two Murals (The Song Cave 2021) is composed of two sections, “Variations on Adonis” and “A Mural After Darwish.” Before diving into the first, I was fascinated by your homage to Mahmoud Darwish’s perhaps most famous volume of poetry, Mural. Can you discuss the influence Darwish has had on your writing and how writing this section came to be.
Jesús Castillo: Thank you also, Esteban, for talking with me.
I guess Darwish influenced my writing by inspiring me to attempt, in my own way, to do some of the things he did, I guess especially in terms of stylistic gambits and themes.
I love how Darwish wrote in an epic register using the so-called lyric I. I like his dreamy image- and thought-flow and his engagement with big universal subjects like selfhood, language, war, love, memory, and otherness. And I love how he views humanity on political and planetary, as well as very personal, scales. I haven’t read much modern or contemporary English-language poetry that matches Darwish’s level of feeling and scope. His voice is incredibly intimate and immediate, completely open and vulnerable and, I think because of that, strong enough to sustain the weight of a lot of history and suffering. There’s a lightness about his seriousness that allows him to do such heavy lifting. I also like his use of the longform, his patterning, and find his work really instructive in that sense.
I’m also just in awe of Darwish’s poetry and happy that he left it for us, and that translators worked and are working to bring it to us non-readers of Arabic.
The section of Two Murals that’s a kind of homage to Darwish’s poetry started as an assignment for a seminar the poet Mary Szybist gave at the University of Iowa when I was a graduate student there.
You must have had your own encounter and relationship with Darwish. What do you think of his work? Or like what was your reaction to it?
ER: I’m quite in awe of who Darwish was not only as a writer, but as a person who had to endure constant displacement. A River Dies of Thirst and Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? are testaments to poetry’s power to document tragedy, happiness, and reality. His prose is stunning as well, and In the Presence of Absence is absolutely sublime. What other writers/works have influenced your work throughout the years, from your first book, Remains (McSweeney’s 2016), to your current one, to your future projects?
JC: I agree completely. He seems to have been an amazing person. And his prose is indeed stunning, ITPOA is incredible, overwhelming in how it just carries you along when you start reading.
As far as other influences… I know it’s an always justified standard question, but… I don’t know. I dislike it. I will give you a list, but know that it’s incomplete, and that often writing is influenced quite importantly not just by other books or writers, but by other mediums like other kinds of art or the experience of the internet or life experiences, or just bits of language or ideas picked up in museum visits, or news media, or random conversations and such. As far as poetry, for my first book, I know I got a lot of ideas from reading the work of Ron Silliman, Rilke, Jack Gilbert, Linh Dinh, Ben Lerner, and Jack Spicer. For this second book obviously Darwish and Adonis were models and I also, towards the end, started reading Walt Whitman’s work seriously for the first time. The poetry of Paul Celan, also, was a kind of guide at times. I don’t have a very well set “current” project, and I won’t talk about the future because I frankly don’t know.
ER: I totally understand. When composing my last collection, I could not stop listening to The Mars Volta, and when asked what influenced me, I felt I couldn’t fully flesh out an explanation that captured the mood their music put me in to put words on the page. Speaking of your first collection, Remains, there is a particular stanza that I haven’t stopped thinking about:
Matamoros will always be gray. Soft ash of factories
covering streets and sky. I see myself walking by a pack
of stray dogs lounging in the wooden porch of a tiny
corner store. Walls covered with rusted brand names.
Aluminum ads nailed to the door. Prices jutting
from dusty shelves. The occasional gunshot, far away,
not to be worried over. It’s all more dream than memory.
The way we patch our cities together from bits of sound
and leftover light, basing the self on compiled
suspicions . To honor some original gesture
that might or might not have been.
Reading your bio for that book, you’ve lived in quite a few places, and the stanza above, for me, gives the city of Matamoros a dream-like quality. Have you felt the same in other places, and how have these cities shaped you or your writing?
JC: Others must have already talked about how our memories are very much like dreams, right?
Yes I’ve felt the same in other places, though of course not the same same. My memories of Matamoros are from childhood, so they're especially distant and maybe more dreamlike because of that. But I know I've felt similarly in other towns.
It’s hard to describe how anything shapes one’s writing, certainly hard to quantify anything’s effect on one’s writing. What’s the formula for figuring out how much this city's air or that unexpected run-in with that friend or the vision of that bird flying out from behind that building affected the way you wrote this poem? Do you even remember that you saw that bird fly out from behind that building before you wrote the poem and that it affected the way you wrote it?
As far as I can tell, places haven’t changed the way I write. By which I mean that I don't think they’ve affected the style in which the lines I write move “on the page” or how the reading experience they create unfolds. What places usually do is provide a good chunk of the images I put in my poems, and maybe some of the subject matter.
More precisely than that, I don’t think I could say with certainty how the places I’ve lived in have shaped my art. I think maybe what has affected my writing more than places themselves is the moving around from place to place. The experience of changing where one lives with relative frequency. I don’t know if the above answer is right, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least incomplete.
In a real sense, one’s environment is everything, shapes everything one does in ways we have trouble being totally conscious of.
Why did you keep thinking of that particular Matamoros stanza?
ER: I keep thinking about it because of my own childhood experiences crossing into Nuevo Progreso (my family and I crossed into Matamoros on occasion, but never consistently). And I remember witnessing a world that felt both familiar and foreign at the same time. I felt a real strong connection to that section of the poem, and although I see that often in poems, the stanza I mentioned creates a feeling in me that other work hasn’t in quite a while.
Switching gears slightly, I want to talk about the ecological imagery in Two Murals. There are recurring images of violence upon the earth, and the stanzas below exemplify, for me, your attention to it:
This land lives in the belly of a caged cow
With swollen ankles, marked for the steel bolt.
It yearns for the putridness of the earth.
A cleansing. It spasms on the floor of its factory.
I see a sound, a cry.
Our cities are fantasies around it,
Scaffolds for skittish minds.
If my interpretation is correct, the earth is a cow not just awaiting slaughter, but welcoming it. The conditions it has had to endure are now unbearable, and in the second stanza, the speaker sees the manner in which our cities are merely illusions for progress, for escaping the reality of a dying earth and our continued role in ensuring its destruction. Can you speak more about this ecological awareness in your work and how it manifested in Two Murals?
JC: I don’t think the Earth needs saving. We need saving, and the species that we’re eliminating as a result of how we live need saving, although the word “need” itself is debatable. But I think the Earth will be fine, it will absorb us and maybe be barren of complex life for a while if we mess up enough, but it will bloom with other life again at some point. I don’t think the Earth will just completely fail and explode because of something human beings do. It will keep existing and it probably won’t take it long to recover from us if that’s what it has to do.
To paraphrase Camille Paglia, the Earth is forever playing solitaire with itself.
The Earth could take in all our destruction and stupidity and digest it and a few millennia (or like a billion years or however long) from now produce another self-aware creature.
I find it hard to say how or if the above comes through in the book, or if it counts as ecological awareness (I’ve never myself used the phrase). I can see how people might read Two Murals and think that I believe the Earth is dying and we need to change to prevent its dying, but I’m pretty sure I don’t believe that and it wasn’t my intention to communicate that in the book. I think the book does mourn a bit, and feels empathy for the planet and its animals and plants. But it also celebrates, or like is fascinated by human beings and all we do and have done, the whole mess. Though the story is also of course sad, especially, to me, because of all the wild natural beauty we have put, and are putting, an end to.
The poetry I like tends to remind us that we are part of the earth, are inseparable from it, that the earth made us and contains us completely; that we are part of nature and the whole universe of phenomena, which is infinitely bigger than us, and that it does us good to remember this--that’s like half, or at least a disproportionately large chunk, of the wisdom poetry holds.
Do you have any thoughts on this? What would you consider to be your ecological awareness? How does it relate to poetry? What can poetry use ecological awareness for?
ER: I think of the poetry of Forrest Gander as being ecologically aware, or the novels of Richard Powers, specifically The Overstory. And there are definitely countless other writers that are escaping me at the moment, but I do believe that poetry can be used as a vessel for ecological awareness, in much the same way that it can be used as a vessel for social justice, reconnecting with our memories, or even just as a chance to process and heal. I would hope that any poetry that is used in these manners can move people to at least think slightly differently than they would have had they not read what was on the page. I think you put it best at the end of your collection when the speaker says, “All I want is the continual re-making of the world.” Is that what you hope for too?
JC: I think this awareness of our place within the greater context of the natural world, or the core of this awareness, is inherent in good poetry; all good poetry is aware of the fact, or has the sense, that we are part of nature, are threads in a fabric infinitely larger than us. Poetry doesn't have to try to be (or we don’t have to “use” poetry as) a vessel for that kind of awareness because poetry IS that awareness itself. Or at least that awareness is a key element in the kind of poetry I think is truly valuable. Poetry that lacks that awareness tends to be flimsy. Just like all poetry that lacks an instinctual awareness of mortality is flimsy.
I mostly dislike poetry that attempts or is made with the intention of being a vessel for what people call social justice; it tends to be bad, as poetry, and usually politically effective only amongst an already-convinced audience.
Also the thing is that if treated as simply a vessel for preconceived purposes, poetry can be used for pretty much anything. Osama bin Laden wrote poetry. In past ages poets were often hired to write terrible fluff poems for the nobility.
I agree that poetry can change how people think in the sense that it can change the manner in which people see the world. By which I mean that poetry is an exercise in a kind of attentiveness that teaches you to appreciate life and the world (and the self) more. I agree also that poetry has the ability to document reality and human events big and small, and that this is important too and can make for great art if done lucidly and well.
I try not to use the word hope often but yes, I still want the same thing I wanted when I wrote that line you're referring to. Although keep in mind that if you're up for the continual re-making of the world you're up for all of it, not only the pleasant, harmonious, agreeably just parts.
ER: How do you think your role in re-making the world would have been different had you not been a writer?
JC: I think it’s likely that I would have taken up another artform and my role in re-making the world would have been determined by that. As it is, I am not only a writer, though. Like many other poets today, I do other work. And anything we do can be a form of re-making, or re-creating, the world. We keep any given aspect of the human world alive by continuing to engage in it.
ER: What is next for you? Where do you think/hope your journey leads you?
JC: Do you mean what's next in terms of literary projects? As I said, I don't really know about the future. I am not working on anything in particular now. I don't wanna talk about my hopes for my "journey" really. I'd rather just try to keep living and see.
