Located Somewhere
An Interview with Chloe Martinez
In her memorable Nobel lecture, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska said the following about poets and their process of putting pen to paper:
Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens …
With perhaps the exception of a few writers whose lives were extravagant beyond the page, the writing life can appear quite mundane, and this no doubt stems from engagement with writing itself, which, as Symborska so aptly puts it, is ripe with a whole lot of nothingness. But for poets, silence and nothingness are no strangers in their attempts at creating meaning, and what happens between the writing and the not-writing often prompts more inspiration than expected.
A lyrical and narrative engaging achievement, Chloe Martinez’s debut collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works 2021) is the result of a patient and rewarding journey years in the making, one that explores identity through a multicultural lens while coming to terms with both the beauties and harsh realities found in the places we occupy and call home.
In addition to Ten Thousand Selves, Martinez is the author of the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Common, Waxwing, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. She is a poetry book reviewer for RHINO and one of the organizers of a reading series, The Sprawwl.
Thank you so much for your time, Chloe. Before diving into Ten Thousand Selves, your debut poetry collection, I wanted to explore your journey behind writing and publishing it. I had the privilege of reading with you a few weeks ago for John Sibley Williams’ book launch, and during the Q&A, you mentioned, if I’m not mistaken, that you had stepped away from writing for a while before coming back into it. What spurred your writing again, and what was your experience bringing the poems in Ten Thousand Selves, as well as in Corner Shrine, your poetry chapbook, to life?
I wish it was something as intentional as the phrase “stepping away” so kindly implies! It was more like a period of failed attempts at writing. I had done two creative writing Master’s programs, one while on a year-long leave from my PhD, and another concurrent with dissertation research. And after those programs, which were wonderful, I just couldn’t manage to write anything much for about six years. I kept trying to write, and meanwhile I was teaching, finishing my dissertation, applying for academic jobs, and making my way through the early years of motherhood. Looking back, that was more than enough! But at the time I felt awful that I wasn’t writing more, and thought poetry was done with me.
In 2015 my family and I moved from outside Philadelphia to Claremont, California, where my husband had found a tenure-track job. My second daughter was born. I was between jobs, and my husband could support us, so I got to spend almost a year at home with her. That in itself was such a lucky thing; it was also the first time I hadn’t felt the panic of whether we might have to pick up and move in another year. I don’t want to paint that time as too idyllic—having a new baby is wonderful but also hard. But I just had a little more breathing room. The Kingsley Tufts poetry prizes are given out in Claremont, and one night I managed to detach the baby from my body and go to the reading that the two poets who win give each year. It was Ross Gay and Danez Smith, and I went home after that reading and started write again. It was like a light switch of possibility was switched back on for me.
After that, I just decided to put more energy into writing, submitting work, finding literary communities, and making the book I had in my head into a reality. After nearly three years of revising and submitting manuscripts, and several finalist nods and close calls, I was just about ready to give up on these particular books. Maybe I’ll just start fresh, I started saying to myself. That is when both my chapbook and book were accepted for publication, within a few months of one another.
I’m so glad that you found a way back into writing (and that writing found you again) because we are graced with Ten Thousand Selves, a collection that is as global as it is personal. Within the book, there are places that take center stage and places that are referred to tangentially, from India to Kabul to California, to name a few. How did you see the inclusion of these places within the book and how do you think they interact with poems where place might be a bit more ambiguous?
That is such a good question! Poems about specific places, poems marked epigraphically with place names, and references to places–all of that was present at the earliest stages of making this book, because I’ve always written out of a very strong sense of place. Even poems in which place may appear ambiguous are, for me, located somewhere. Although I think of myself as someone with a pretty bad memory in general, I often have very clear memories of where I was when I wrote the first draft of a poem–what city, what room, what chair. I was sitting on the floor in the guest room at my in-laws’ house in Sacramento when I wrote “The God Structure.” The blackberries in that poem are real blackberries that I ate in their backyard with my kids; the cathedral is abstract, but contains a memory of being in a cathedral in France, decades earlier; the fact that I was sitting on the floor is absent from the poem, but has a lot to do with the way that poem let me get down low emotionally, accessing feelings that I had been avoiding until the poem came along–feelings of sadness, anger and helplessness.
The places that appear in this book include places I’ve lived and returned to (for ex. places in India and California, New York City, my hometown of New Bedford, MA) as well as places I’ve only imagined (Kabul). But in all these cases, there’s something I’m trying to find out about the relation between humans and environments (natural and man-made, over time or in the present moment). I think I write out of a deep interest in what it means to be a certain person in a certain place at a certain time. How is my experience of any place shaped by my own history there, and by my knowledge (or ignorance) of the histories that precede me? When I return to a place, it’s different every time–I’m a different person, the place has changed, my knowledge or understanding of the place may have shifted. I see the experience of place as an accrual and unfolding over time, and I’m fascinated by that process, which mirrors the accrual and unfolding of the poem itself. If a poem succeeds, it has accomplished some kind of movement and transformation in the writer, the reader, and the materials of the poem, all in that magical small space from the first line to the last.
What movement was achieved within you when this collection was complete?
Completing the collection, but even more, having it accepted for publication–that was really freeing for me. Within a few months of the book’s acceptance, and without any conscious intention of doing so, I started writing a much more tightly-thematic group of poems that are shaping up into my second manuscript. Having the first book off my hands certainly gave me permission, as well as confidence, to move forward. Having the book in the world has also allowed me to do all that book-in-the-world stuff: doing more readings and events, making connections with other poets around our work—this conversation that we’re having right now, for example! It’s been energizing and uplifting for me. You can do all that without a book, but with a book it gets much easier.
While there are poems that may embody the spirit of fables and parables, there are poems that are quite specific to modern-day issues, and one poem that I couldn’t stop reading was “After Morning Drop-Off, I Change the Station from Kiss-FM to the Kavanaugh Hearings.” In particular, these lines resonated so powerfully:
But it’s all over
The radio: girls and women only just now learning—
Words for what was done or almost done, for what had
Undone them wordlessly. I want her to have words.
I want nothing done to her. I want for her
An entirely different language.
The speaker wants nothing more than her daughter to have the knowledge and language to speak as courageously as Christine Blasey Ford did about her abuser. What language do you believe poetry, and literature, provides for those who have historically been kept from possessing it?
I want to answer your question by re-using your words, which I think are just right: I think poetry, and literature, does give language to those who have been historically silenced, and the fact that it does that is a constant source of amazement and hope for me. A secondary question is, how does poetry do that? I think that poetry gives us our own language, our own silences. Every poet’s unique language and silence in turn enriches the larger poetry language—which I think of as a living, breathing sort of thing, shared, organic as a forest. It keeps evolving, keeps growing. That growth is enabled by all the liberties poetry lets us take. What we say in poems is mediated by technique, but can be free (if we want it to be) of the apparati of other kinds of writing and speech—the requirements of genre, social situation, or even grammar can be shucked off, remade, or deployed to new purposes. Poems let us use language in whatever way we need to, in order to say the most urgent things, or to let that urgency be heard in the unspoken.
In this poem I was expressing my shock and gratitude to Christine Blasey Ford for speaking out and also my slow-dawning understanding of all the ways women (and anyone at the receiving end of violence or discrimination) can be compelled to stay silent. I think that each generation gains more and better language to express and resist these kinds of violence, thanks to Dr. Ford and others; I wish that there would instead be less need for that language, less violence—but thanks to Justice Kavanaugh and others, I doubt that will be the case. Poetry keeps pushing forward anyway, and I think it always will.
What other themes took on that urgency within your book? What do you ultimately hope this collection has said that wasn’t quite said before (whether on a personal or social level)?
As these poems came into focus and as they made their way into a conversation with one another, I was able to see my own preoccupations and write into them. Along with gender as a force that shapes female experience, I realized I was writing about the constant negotiations we all make between different places, cultures, and identities, and the tension between material life and what I would call “the spiritual”--though I don’t really mean any religious affiliation per se, I mean the interior life that we all need, and that we may have trouble finding space for. A bunch of different problems come up in the poems: the problem of my messy house; the problem of how to explain current events to my daughter; the problem of how to write about India as a scholar of South Asia who is not South Asian; the problem of how to understand lacunae in my family history. These problems, and the realms that they inhabit, and the selves that encounter each one, are not ever separate from one another, but we are often expected to keep them separate. This book was about letting that messy, interconnected reality through, and that feels urgent and new to me. When we let our multiplicity and our messiness show, we can actually see each other better! And then we can find new ways into community, which is to say, we can see beyond our own concerns and into spaces of care and shared responsibility. That’s what these poems helped me to understand; I hope they do that for readers as well.
What I love about poetry collections is the arrangement of the poems themselves, and the steps the author took to arrive at the order that they present the world. Your last poem, “Volcano,” ends with an image of a door opening:
Cuts out a door in the shape
Of a volcano
She says, I’m going to make the volcano disappear!
No holy orders
No bodhisattva vow
No ascetic regimen
She opens the door—
Can you speak a bit further about that poem and how it came to be chosen as the last?
This poem came very quickly, and felt like a gift from my younger daughter, who was four or five at the time and did just what I describe in the poem. It’s a strange little poem, and one that probably doesn’t work well on its own—the poems that precede it help to give a reader context to enter it, and I like that about it too. By the time I got to this poem, which was written late in the making of the book, I had started reading the Therigatha, which is a Buddhist scripture containing the poems of the first Buddhist nuns, some of which probably go back to the 6th century BCE. The form, tone, and concerns of those poems, many of which are brief and plainspoken, wasn’t consciously in my head when I wrote “Volcano” but looking back, I think they were in the background. Unlike the speaker of this poem, those nuns had taken ascetic vows, but they were still writing about the struggle to manage worldly concerns, the difficulties of meditating and gaining enlightenment, and the realities of being female in a patriarchal world. The directness with which they talk about all of that is wonderful and gave me something I needed.
Many of the poems in this book are unfolding a complex thought or reality gradually, thinking their way through experiences, spaces and time periods. This poem was totally different. It felt as if a big cloud of experience could suddenly fit into a small, simple container. That ease, and opening up, and the idea that maybe it is possible, just occasionally, to inhabit all our selves at once—that was the movement I wanted at the end of the book.
