On Grace, Homage, and Writing Toward the Sacred
A Conversation with Orlando Ricardo Menes
“I will not desist in finding God, mine & yours, on these alleys & cul-de- / sacs—” writes Orlando Ricardo Menes in “Théophile Gautier in Istanbul,” a poem in his newest collection, The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (University of New Mexico Press, 2022). Never are Menes’s many speakers without God as they traverse historical and personal landscapes, and never are they without the comfort of literary and artistic ancestors that have paved the way for beauty, truth, and an understanding of the world that transcends any one ideology. In these pages we find homage to painters Víctor Manuel, María Brito, and Wifredo Lam, as well as to writers as stylistically diverse as Hart Crane, José Lezama Lima, and Alejo Carpentier. Menes reaches through time to illuminate aspects of a painting or a life that isn’t as readily apparent on the surface, and he does this by embracing the ekphrastic, by lyrically heaping praise where it has not always been given, and by carving out narratives that are as inventive as they are grounded in a shared reality.
The author of seven poetry collections, including Memoria, Fetish, and Heresies, Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is Professor of English and Poetry Editor of the Notre Dame Review. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, and the Hudson Review. I had the honor of speaking with one of the most generous and insightful poets about his latest collection, his craft, and the everyday opportunities writing offers.
Esteban Rodriguez: Orlando, I’m incredibly thankful for your time. One of the most engaging aspects of your newest collection, The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds, are poems that draw inspiration from artwork, literary figures, and music. On one page we could have a letter addressed to José Lezama Lima (one of Cuba’s most famous poets and novelists) and on another we could read a poem that had its genesis in a mixed media installation from María Brito or a tourist poster of a giant American woman in a bikini standing over Cuba. When approaching this collection, what did these other mediums inspire in you to put pen to paper? Has this always been the case with your writing?
Orlando Ricardo Menes: Thank you for your interest in my poetry, Esteban. I have been writing ekphrastic poems for quite some time, ever since the 1990’s when I wrote poems inspired by the paintings of Brueghel and Wyeth. Both of these were dramatic monologues, another form that I have explored since that time. In this new collection, my poems to other writers, including Hart Crane and Alejo Carpentier, are much more personal and vocational than the ekphrastic poems. Now that I am in my early 60’s it is important to me to explore why I write poems and to whom I should demonstrate allegiance or kinship. I have had few living mentors in my life. I cannot really say why exactly. I suppose that I need some historical distance from the poems and the poets that inspire me but not always, however. For example, I was much indebted to Galway Kinnell’s poetry in that he awakened in me the need to give voice to a deep humanism that goes beyond the autobiographical and the quotidian. And yet I have written many poems about the everyday, about ordinary things, about the little miracles that make us human. I have no ideology as a poet, no allegiance to any school or to any clique. Now to the ekphrastic poems in this new collection. I am very curious about the connections between visual art and poems–that is, how to translate someone else’s images into my own words, how to translate a visual imagination into a literary imagination. It is an exhilaratingly mysterious process that allows me to enter into and give voice to another consciousness. This is exactly what I aim to do with my dramatic monologues which are almost always prose poems. I want to think and feel like someone or something else, be it Caliban, the minotaur, a painter, a saint (whether “real” or imagined), or the bikini-clad gargantua that you refer to in your question. In that last poem I very wanted to enter into the underlying imperial American consciousness that viewed Cuba as a plaything to own and exploit.
ER: The idea of grace is one that isn’t always discussed openly, so reading your poem “Grace” offered such a fresh perspective of what grace is and what it provides. I kept coming back to the following lines:
It cannot be forfeited or suspended. Rather,
Grace is asymmetric, parabolic, skewed to love,
Immanent and absolute, but also unpredictable
As quantum particles, both here and there,
Both full and empty, so it might arrive
Inopportunely and thus slip under hope,
Upsetting the earnest prayer, teasing our faith
Grace doesn’t always fall easily into one category, and while it may tease our faith, it does, as the ending of the poem says, “drench at last the drought-scourged earth.” How do you seek to define grace when it appears in your work? How does it manifest outside of your writing?
ORM: Yes, I do keep going back to grace in my poems, especially as I am getting older. For me grace not only encompasses the sacred but also the aesthetic. How, for instance, the world can be (by God’s munificent design) endowed by beauty in all its varied, quizzical, and unsystematic ways as in G.M. Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty,” which is in itself so wondrously strange as a curtal sonnet, so compressed that its intensity strikes me as a kind of singularity from which the Big Bang exploded–how so few words can hold so much meaning. This is the sense or significance of grace that I am thinking about: alogical, timeless, fathomless, and thus ungraspable by the human mind, perhaps even exasperating but yet also necessary as water. I don’t go to church and am not aligned with any religion, so my way of feeling and expressing the sacred, in all its dazzling complexity, is through poetry.
ER: How do you believe your newest collection connects with your earlier ones (Memoria, Heresies, Fetish)? How does it break away? And to add on to that, what new ground are you exploring in your work currently?
ORM: They all have in common the different nations and cultures with which I have been associated: Cuba, Spain, Peru, and the United States. Some will highlight one over another, but these are constants in my work. Also, they all delve into my Catholic upbringing: another constant. My imagination draws from the Catholic faith (and its rituals, artifacts, etc.), my own particular language, my emotions, my sense of reverence (or irreverence, its obverse), and perhaps the baroqueness of its conceits. I feel like Richard Crashaw in the body of a cubanito who lived for many years in Little Havana, specifically near Douglas Road and SW Eighth Street, what Cubans call la sagüesera. And where did this love for the baroque originate? Spain. I lived in Madrid between 1973 and 1975, and in the 9th grade (cuarto de bachillerato) I took a Spanish history class with a lovely and inspiring teacher, and when I heard say barroco with pride, with fascination as she showed us slides of the great architectural works of the Spanish Golden Age, I experienced an epiphany that I will never forget. I was hooked, bedazzled, awed, etc. I recognized a deep bond to Spain and to my Spanish ancestors. Now to where Gospel breaks away: my poems about Turkey and Italy. And also the much more intensive exploration of the visual arts, which I am continuing to do in the poems that I am now working on, but this time it’s not just the Spanish masters but also the works of several English painters like J.M.W. Turner, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, and others. I will also be writing poems inspired by the Lake District in England, which I just toured over the summer, and thus poems about Wordsworth and Thomas De Quincey. Other poems will be homages to William Blake and John Keats.
ER: A poem that I found myself returning to was the second in the collection, “The Blackberry Tree.” The speaker remembers climbing a blackberry tree in his youth and seeing a “bare woman” for the first time. At the end, the speaker recalls seeing a similar nakedness in church, and while witnessing a mother breastfeeding might be the most natural scene in the world, the speaker was led to believe that even the slightest exposure of flesh was impure:
At Mass in the Church of the Nazarenes
I had seen women feed their bundled babies
with breasts exposed, and Mamá would pull my lobe,
telling me to think of Mary nursing Baby Jesus
with a shawl of bristly wool as modesty demands.
Our priests taught that flesh is the parchment
of sin and God’s suckling grace can be lost
by the smallest transgressions in this world
where goodness fails to root against the weed.
Fifty years on I now know that His Law slants
to love, and I will not eat their bread of shame
leavened with fear.
There is a recognition from the speaker now that he is older, and it reminded me that change (of perspective, mindset, emotions) because of love is always possible. How do you seek to define love, and how does poetry help us come closer to these sentiments rather than succumbing to shame or fear?
ORM: I don’t think that any Catholic today would believe that the naked human body is shameful, but 50 plus years back this was certainly the case. My Cuban mother would wear a lace veil during Mass and mutter her prayers (so as not make a show of herself), and thus she was raised with the necessity of pudor (modesty) and sexual purity for a virtuous woman. She would frequently mention to me how she remained a virgin until marriage. That sense of shame was pervasive in the culture in which I was raised, not just for women but also for men who had to display manliness or else they would be seen as sissies. How, then, does one love in such a fraught social structure, specifically because love requires humility and vulnerability; otherwise, human grace is impossible. One loves by being patient with the flaws of others, by being generous, by being transformative with oneself. I am not sure that I can achieve these in my everyday life, no matter how hard I try, but at least in the imagination expressing love for humankind, for the human spirit, despite all our flaws and transgressions, is much more possible and achievable. In fact, it is through the imagination, where I am freer of my limitations, that I am able to project love and forgiveness. Art is where I find grace.
ER: I absolutely love that line, “One loves by being patient with the flaws of others, by being generous, by being transformative with oneself.” What transformative actions/beliefs have you taken over the years to become the person/writer you are today?
ORM: As a teacher and a reader of poetry, I have become much more curious about how poems, whether I like them or not, are made, how they inhabit the imagination, how they create patterns or rhythms, and for younger poets, it seems to me, these are more visual than oral, as in a visual prosody, with myriad permutations of how words move on the page, a kind of topography that gives them much freedom of invention. These structures of words, which can also be seen as architectural, connect with Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” but go much beyond visual movement and energy. I was not introduced to poems of this kind when I was learning the craft in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It was the sound of the poems, the force of the words, the attitude of the voice that drew me to such poems as Blake’s “London” or Yeats’s “Easter 1916” or Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Although I have come to understand this visual prosody, I am more a poet of sound within the limits of the line, and I feel (in my ear) the comfort and stability of the ten-syllable line. Nonetheless, I have been writing prose poems for years, yet they make use of patterns of sound (anaphora, parallelism, alliteration and assonance, etc.) that evoke more the poetic than the prosaic. In other words, I think of lineated poems as vertical while prose poems as horizontal.
ER: What does your writing process look like?
ORM: I tend to write from late in the morning until dinner time at around five PM. I always begin writing a poem with notes or sketches of possible lines, but I will also do freewriting in Spanish (without punctuation or accents, just stream-of-consciousness) so that I can access my subconscious mind or the child in me who will make all kinds of associations or connections that the adult me would not make. Nonetheless, even when drafting in English, I tend to be drawn to metaphor and to textural details that emphasize the beauty of language.
ER: Apart from your own poetry, you are a translator of poetry in Spanish. Can you give us some background about the process behind your translated work, My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009)? Are there any current projects in translation you are working on?
ORM: Because I am a native speaker of Spanish, I will translate directly from the Spanish language to English, just as I did with Storni’s poetry but also with the poetry of José Kozer. I tend to follow the original lineation while making adjustments based on syntax. I will thereafter finesse the translation for rhythm and diction. At times I might take a few liberties with the original; nonetheless, I still follow Octavio Paz’s advice to be faithful but never servile. I don’t really have any projects right now, except for translating occasionally the poetry of my late friend and colleague (at Miami-Dade Community College) Amando Fernández who was born in Havana but was actually raised in Galicia, Spain, then immigrated to the United States as an adult, dying of AIDS in 1994.
ER: As a professor and as the Poetry Editor of Notre Dame Review (you were gracious enough to accept a few poems of mine in 2017; thank you!), a lot of contemporary poetry comes your way. What makes you excited about the current state of poetry (regardless of its country of origin)?
ORM: You are most welcome. Your poems certainly made an impression on me. I tend to receive poems mostly from people who have some association or acquaintance with the Notre Dame Review since it was founded in the early 1990’s. John Matthias was its longtime poetry editor until I took over from him about twelve years ago. I continue to be excited about the quality of the submissions and by the inventiveness of the language, in particular by the younger poets, whose imaginations are prodigious and exorbitant and thus a continuous delight to me.
ER: The last poem of any poetry collection is no doubt a deliberate choice, and your poem, “Triptych Number 4: Wifredo Lam”— inspired by Lam’s painting Character with Two Elegguas—meditates on possibility, purpose, and cosmological questions of meaning and being. I was moved by the following lines at the end of the first section, “Mythopoesis”:
& you will sing me of fire & smoke,
cradle me in your cauldron’s belly,
nurse me with your spigot breasts until the last breath
when all living things must corrode to the eternal swarf & sawdust.
Who and what will sing, cradle, and nurse you as you continue your literary journey?
ORM: First off, I need to indicate that I am a Catholic, even if not a very good one, and probably quite eccentric, so much so that others might view my poems as heretical, which I take as a compliment even if it isn’t. Nonetheless, even as a Catholic I can be moved, enticed, even intoxicated by other spiritualities, such as the anamistic Santeria religion of Cuba (also called Regla de Ocha). I have great respect for it, though my family, so proud of their Spanish ancestors, has been perplexed by my interest in it. However, I write about the totality of Cuba, not just the Spanish component, so that the African influences have to be not just acknowledged but also reverenced. This island is a paradox in the Caribbean: the most European but also the most African. Now to your specific question. This piece of art by Wifredo Lam revealed to me a mother figure (the character of the title) who is a spirit of nature, made flesh, at least in my imagination, perhaps not in Lam’s, by metallic body parts and elements of the foundry that just captivated me with a disquieting sublimity. In the Catholic sense she could be perceived as Our Lady of Cobre or Our Lady of Regla (the orichas Ochun and Yemaya their Santeria equivalents). She is thus nurturing, sustaining, lacteally cosmic, but also a tad dangerous, foreboding, and unpredictable as she is accompanied by not just one Eleggua but two, this being the oricha, or spirit, of the crossroads where one’s fate is decided. He is a trickster, also called Eshu, Papa Legba, etc., who must be fed before all the other orichas or else bad things will happen. He loves to dance, play, tease, and thus he’s syncretized with the Christ Child El Nino de Atocha.
