We were lucky to chat with José Olivarez, award-winning poet and educator, author of Citizen Illegal, and a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, about inspiration, migration, invisibility, working with violence in poetry, and how lucky we are to be in the midst of so many great contemporary Latinx poets. An active member of the poetry community, José also co-hosts The Poetry Gods podcast with Aziza Barnes and Jon Sands, and is the co-editor of the upcoming BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket 2020). He recently joined Latinx in Publishing to co-host the Writers for Migrant Workers Benefit in NYC in late 2019.
Read on for our full Q&A below:
1. WHAT INSPIRES YOU AS A WRITER?
Tamara K. Nopper shared this Octavia E. Butler story on Twitter one day that I love: “Forget about inspiration, because it's more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, "I can't write today because I'm not inspired." I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me.” —Octavia E. Butler
2. WHO ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE CONTEMPORARY LATINX WRITERS?
Elizabeth Acevedo, Eloisa Amezcua, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Joseph Rios, Javier Zamora, Janel Pineda, Jacob Saenz, Sandra Cisneros, Erika L. Sanchez, Shea Serrano, and Raquel Salas Rivera come to mind first and foremost, but let me also say that there are so many incredible contemporary Latinx writers working right now. We are lucky.
3. YOU TACKLE HEAVY THEMES IN CITIZEN ILLEGAL — MIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP AND BELONGING, RACE, IDENTITY (PERFORMATIVE AND REAL). WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO FOCUS ON THOSE ELEMENTS?
Shit. I don’t know how much I decided on that. My family’s migration (was it forced? was it voluntary?) has opened up so many questions in our relationships with each other (how? why? when? with? for?) and my relationship with the United States. I think migration shapes the way I see the world, so I don’t know how much of a choice it was. For me, where I exercised choice was in how I presented those themes. I didn’t want to enact violence for the sake of giving my book gravitas. I think that would have been bullshit, so in talking about these heavy themes where violence is always present, it helped to turn to the poetics of Afrofuturism to think about how I framed the poems. A lot of the poems are doubles. They start in the same place, but end in different places. That was on purpose.
4. HOW DID CITIZEN ILLEGAL COME TO BE? HOW DID YOU COME TO POETRY?
I came to poetry because I was a huge reader and a good student and by good student, I mean I was invisible. I got tired of being invisible. I had never chosen invisibility. Poetry allowed me to ask myself if I was becoming the person I wanted to become or was I just accepting someone else’s vision of myself. I started writing through the Louder Than A Bomb Poetry Festival, my favorite festival in the world.
My book came together over about four years. Most helpfully, I got to work with young people during that time, especially in Chicago, and a lot of the poems came out of the same workshops I gave to the students. A bunch more came from the conversations we were having with each other.
5. WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO GET THE RECOGNITION OF MAJOR AWARDS LIKE THE RUTH LILLY
It feels great. And it’s also a little disorienting. I dreamed of writing poems that people cared about and might be useful. And now that it’s happening, I miss the quiet. I feel more anxious now. I don’t miss being broke though. Being broke sucks.
6. YOU’RE ALSO AN EDITOR AND RUN A PODCAST (THE POETRY GODS). CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT THOSE PROJECTS AND HOW THEY INFLUENCE YOUR WRITING?
Being an editor and a podcaster helps me zoom out. It gives me a chance to engage with poetry with a different set of eyes. I think it helps me clarify my own writing project to myself.
7. FOR NEW READERS BEING INTRODUCED TO YOUR WORKS, WHERE DO YOU RECOMMEND THEY START AND WHY?
I recommend starting with “Mexican American Disambiguation,” “You Get Fat When You’re In Love”, and “Mexican Heaven.” Those poems are anthemic. I think about my book like an album. Those poems would be the singles.
8. TEACHING IS ALSO SEEMS TO BE AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR PRACTICE. DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR YOUNG POETS?
My advice is read everything. Especially Aracelis Girmay. Ultimately, your writing practice is yours, so you have to experiment and figure out what works for you. I can’t give you that answer, but for me reading is the foundation of everything. Especially reading Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz and Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall.
9. WHAT LATINX WRITERS (OR BOOKS) INFLUENCED YOUR WRITING (OR YOU AS A PERSON)?
Willie Perdomo was hugely influential. Emma Pérez. Carmen Gimenez Smith. Paul Martínez Pompa got bars. Vanessa Angelica Villareal. Daniel Borzutzky. Not to mention visual artists like Sentrock, Kane, Yvette Mayorga and Runsy.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he is co-editing the forthcoming anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods and a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, & the Conversation Literary Festival. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers.
