On Poetry with Amy M. Alvarez
Interview w/ Amy M. Alvarez
Photographer: Adam Lewis
Amy M. Alvarez is a poet, educator, and scholar. Her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, regionality, nationality, borderless-ness, and systemic injustice/social justice. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, PRISM international, Rattle, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. She is both a CantoMundo and a VONA Fellow. Amy was born and raised in Queens, New York to a Jamaican mother and Puerto Rican father. She has taught English, History, and Humanities at public high schools in the Bronx, New York and in Boston, Massachusetts. She now lives in Morgantown, West Virginia and teaches writing at West Virginia University. Follow her on Twitter @Amy__Writes
Amy M. Alvarez had three poems featured in Issue 9.2. As TIMBER continues working to foster ongoing relationships with our writers and contributors, I reached out to Amy and our Poetry Editor Phuong T. Vuong about discussing those three pieces we had published, along with her thoughts on them looking back, her process, and what she’s working on now.
—
Mackenzie Suess: Thanks so much for your time, Amy. Your three pieces published in issue 9.2—“Amphibious”, “Shaped into a Kind of Life” and “(This is my body—)”—all center on the body in myriad ways: as metamorphic; in relation to colonial legacies, representation, beauty; as subject to physical and psychic force; as made small. The body is impressed upon again and again, yet also remains an agentive force. Can you talk about the body’s relationship to agency and its lack thereof in your work?
Amy M. Alvarez: As a Black Latinx woman, the history of my own body is one of reclamation of agency from systems of white colonialist patriarchy. In the three poems in published in TIMBER last summer—an issue that was themed around “(de)humanization”—my goal was to give voice to both the dehumanizing and humanizing experiences that Black women and girls experience in their bodies.
MS: The first poem (“Amphibious”) is particularly narratively driven while “(This is my body—)” is much less so. Do you approach pieces in terms of narrative or non-narrative in mind, or let the piece take shape first, then layer in or strip away narrative in revision?
AMA: Great question. I often let the piece—the speaker’s voice and the content—inform me about whether the poem should be more narrative or lyrical. “(this is my body—)” began as a lyric poem and mostly remained that way. “Amphibious” began as a more narrative piece.
“Shaped into a Kind of Life” was different for me because I wrote that piece thinking about the form before the content. That poem was interesting to write because the form wrested ideas from me that I may not have considered otherwise.
MS: Along those lines, each of these three poems utilizes form differently. How do you think about form, shape, constraint in relationship to your work?
AMA: I tend to let the content of a poem drive the form and shape. Some poems want concision and containment while others need to be expansive on the page. The Golden Shovel form and tercets of “Shaped into a Kind of Life” allowed me to create a “container” for rage and grief. The use of space in “(this is my body—)” allowed me to think about the body varying states of shame, frustration, and glory; wanted this piece to be a kind of choreographed dance between those emotive states. “Amphibious” was a poem I toyed with making a sonnet, but I felt that was too constrictive for a piece that was about expansiveness in the body and mind, so I chose to make it 15 lines and push the end of the poem toward openness.
MS: Looking back on these pieces now, what strikes you about them? Do they feel representative of your body of work, or what you’re writing now, or do you see them as grounded in a specific period of your writing life?
AMA: I wrote these poems between the summer of 2016 and 2017. In that time, I changed my career and moved away from a blue state where I’d lived for over a decade to a red one. It was a personally challenging time, but it was a period that felt fruitful for me as a writer. I’m not sure whether these poems would be representative of my body of work overall in terms of style or form, but they are certainly thematically connected to the rest of my work in terms of how they focus on embodiment, remembrance, and the personal impact of colonization and racism.
MS: What books/new writers/other fields and topics are informing your work at the moment?
AMA: Much of my reading at the moment centers around womanism and Black feminisms (lots of bell hooks and also How We Get Free by the Combahee River Collective) critical pedagogy (I’m rereading Paulo Freire’s work and have been introduced to the work of Adam J. Banks), Black Marxism (reading Cedric J. Robinson and wishing I had read his work as an undergrad!), and creative writing by Black and Indigenous writers (current reading work by Camille Dungy, Morgan Parker, Tommy Orange, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Crystal Wilkinson).
Phuong T. Vuong: You have a collection of poems you’re currently sending out to publishers. What's been the journey for getting your collection published and where has that led you?
AMA: I have submitted portions of my manuscript to book contests but being overly critical of my own work has led me to be rather reluctant to publish the collection in its entirety. I’m hoping to complete a final round of edits on the manuscript this summer and start submitting this fall. This interview a good reminder that I need to get the work done!
PTV/ MS: How have you been taking care of yourself in this time as an educator, poet, Black-Latinx woman? In what ways is writing an act of care for you, or not?
AMA: I have been trying to find ways to reconnect with the natural world. I ride my bike on a trail near a river where I live and watch chipmunks and hawks, I stop to take in the scent of flowers and the trickle of water down rockfaces. I try to make stopping and seeing in nature a practice I can bring to my daily life. I have also been finding peace through meditation.
I like your question about whether or not writing is an act of self-care. While I find that writing can be an act of self-care, it can also be incredibly draining. Lately, I have found myself writing about the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the police. I found writing these poems cathartic, but they were still incredibly painful to write. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa that often poetry comes from a place of psychic unrest. However, once we interrogate and make meaning from this unrest in our work as writers, we emerge feeling better, for the moment. That cycle of unrest, meaning making through the labor of writing, and wellness is one that I find myself engaged in constantly; it is a cycle that is necessary for my survival even when it is arduous.
Mackenzie Suess is a writer and editor based in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Sundog Lit, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded grants and fellowships to write, teach, and present her work globally, and currently teaches writing workshops at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Phuong T. Vuong is a writer, scholar, educator, and sometimes artist. She is interested in speaking to and calling out the silences in the Vietnamese/ American and Asian/ American experience. has been awarded writing fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. She is a graduate of Amherst College and holds an MFA from the University of Colorado- Boulder, and will begin her PhD in Literature at the University of California- San Diego in Fall 2020.
Issue 10.2