José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, and the author of two collections of poems, including, most recently, Promises of Gold—which was long listed for the 2023 National Book Awards. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Alongside Antonio Salazar, he published the hybrid book, Por Siempre in 2023. He lives in Jersey City, NJ. To learn more visit: https://joseolivarez.com
Melissa Castillo-Garsow: What is the connection between pop culture and poetry for you? And why does pop culture, matter to you?
José Olivarez: I'll start with the second question first. I think pop culture matters to me because it's a conversation that is accessible to many people and because it matters to the people that I love and care about. It doesn't matter if you’ve read a ton of books or that prides yourself on keeping up with social issues writ large. Everyone has these different touchstones. Because we live in the age of the Internet there’s been some splintering. There are pop stars Beyoncé or Bad Bunny that are known by everyone. And, more and more we have niche communities that we care about.
Within pop culture you get these different windows into what it means to be a citizen of the United States. What it means to be a participant in some way in empire whether it's active or passive. You get insights into some of the myth-making that happens around the United States and the American dream, and those are all connected to things that I like to think about and dream about in my poetry. So, there's an easy connection to be made between a Canelo Alvarez boxing match and questions that I have around nationalism, my connection to México as a homeland (where it surges and fades) as a person of diaspora and migration That's the connection.
You mentioned some of these niche communities, and there's a lot of regional cultural specificity, so are there any particular sites of pop culture inspiration, anything that you find yourself returning to?
I write most about my relationship with my dad, returning to Vincente Fernandez and the music that my dad would play when we had people over for a party or on Saturday or Sunday mornings when he was relaxing at home after a long week of work. I've taken an interest in the things my younger brother (10 years younger than me) is interested in like Peso Pluma. Growing up in Calumet City outside Chicago and visiting the Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago with murals dedicated to Selena and Frida Kahlo was a reminder of their legacy and how their legacies are used and commercialized.
I feel like you have a unique voice. If I was reading a poem of yours without the author listed, I might be able to guess it was yours. How did you develop that voice and did you ever get any pushback from traditional poetry spaces that might say, this is not poetic? Like, what is poetic, anyway?
Yeah, absolutely. So I started writing for performance. My early inspirations as a writer and a performer were poets like Saul Williams or Mayda Del Valle who are very intense when they're performing. Their words become physical. I wanted to be able to write and perform in that manner. What I discovered is that for whatever reason, that voice was something that I admired, but wasn't something that necessarily feel comfortable. I think that audiences could tell. So what ended up happening was, I would perform these poems, and I would try to, to really be as dramatic and intense as I could. Then it would get a fine reaction. Afterwards, I would laugh and crack jokes with the audience and talk shit and the audience would love that; it was the part that they really latched on to. So I started to think: Saul Williams is already Saul Williams. Mayda del Valle is already Mayda del Valle. I'm not going to be them. I need to find my own way. So I started to experiment with humor and use of everyday language, mixing high and low registers of art. n. The positive feedback at live venues encouraged me to continue to develop this particular voice.
You also asked about what the reception was in traditional poetic venues. At first it was very cold in a lot of places. I think a lot of publications when they have white editors they have a particular vision for what you know, a Latino, Latine poem should be. They have a particular vision for what the themes, structures, and impact should be. They have particular visions for what a Mexican American, a Chicano poem should be. The fact that I was writing about the ripples afterwards of migration, and not directly focused on the trauma, wasn't registering. I got pushed back because the way I looked at particular issues and I also got pushed back because they didn’t really know how to how to contextualize the voice I was using, which was much different than great writers like Sandra Cisneros, Erika Sanchez, and Eduardo Corral. They didn't know how to place me. So I got a lot of rejections.
For me, it wasn't until I was published in an anthology called The BreakBeat Poets that gathered together was poets that use Hip Hop as inspiration for their poetics that people started to to contextualize me not just with Erika Sanchez, but also with Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith. I think my voice started to make more sense in a different kind of cultural context.
Turning to your new book, Promises of Gold, why the translated double book and how has this come from your experience with how a Spanish-speaking audience engages with your poetics differently, with like your previous work being translated as well? Those types of the translated books, bilingual are not super common.
Publishing the book in Spanish and English grew from what happened with my first book Citizen Illegal. I was invited to read this in La Ciudad de México In 2019. I was super nervous. I realized that my poems were so particular to the experience in the United States and in Chicago, that I worried how audiences in México would react. I read the poems at one of a poetry institute at one of the universities, at a museum in front of a live audience, and in someone's backyard at a little gathering. Every time I got really great feedback from the translations and it just, it made me so happy.
It was generally maybe the most moving experience that I've had as an artist to be able to connect with artists and poets and writers in México. Because I didn't know that I would ever get to have a relationship with México that was outside of my parents' relationship with México. I didn't know that as an artist, I would ever get to have a relationship with readers in México.
The other experience I'd like to share is when when I was invited to spend a whole day at a high school in Los Angeles. The day was pretty standard for me. I started out doing a reading for the students and teaching a couple of workshops throughout the day. But then at night, I taught a workshop in Spanish for the parents. I taught a translation of Jimmy Santiago Baca's poems and the parents wrote these beautiful poems. It made me think about how when I was reading books in middle school and high school, I couldn't share what I was reading with my parents. There were no books that I read, even if they were by a Latina person, that I could share. They were written in English, so they couldn't read along with me. So I thought it might be useful, even if it was just useful to one family, for them to be able to read it together and maybe have an experience together. I thought that that would be worth it. So that's where that idea came from.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote a lot of this during lockdown, right? COVID? Right, so a lot of us were sitting around watching TV or reading, is there anything that you were watching or reading that, that shaped you?
Yeah. I was watching a lot of TV. A lot of bad TV. A lot of Love is Blind that premiered during that time. For me, the big experience that kind of shaped me while I was writing that was just trying to maintain my friendships, particularly with people that didn't live in New York City, which is where I spent the early part of the pandemic. I just remembering the experience of, like getting on a Zoom call and all of us being scared and not wanting to scare the other person. And so that was kind of what made me really want to dig into those relationships and how we go about maintaining them. That was the big thing that kind of was staying with me.
You definitely get that in the book. There's so much love, and I love love that explore that is beyond romantic love, personally. One of the things I enjoy about your poems as well is the imaginative quality of your poems. Like Mexican heaven, right? There's imaginative quality with humor as well. How does that play a role in your poetry?
One of the things as I was developing as a writer and I started to see that one of the reasons why I wasn't getting poetry acceptance is because of the kind of different angles that I took towards my subjects. I just kind of decided early on that I didn't want my poetry to just reiterate what was already on the news basically 24/7, right? Which are all of these crises where we are detained in migration or found drowned at the border or arrested in Queens. If you turn on the news, there’s guaranteed to be a story about how our people die or how our people suffer or how our people are being held in a detention center. I didn’t want my poems to simply repeat those stories.
I think it’s important to know about what’s happening, but I think It’s also important to spend time imagining and to remember that just because things are the way they are, they don’t have to stay that way. Even if it’s mischievous, funny, and for me, it also feels like a way to take that power in some way. To turn the circumstances around, to play with these inherited and real narratives that we have to deal with.
My last question is, do you have any either Latine poetry or popular culture recommendations for readers, but for all year round?
That's right. It is heritage. We get to exist for a whole month.
This magazine though, we're doing this all year round.
Which is awesome. Let me think. Because I've been writing, I haven't been reading a whole lot, so these are some recommendations that I can think of off the top of my head.
José’s Picks for Year-Round Latine Listening, Reading, Watching
Bad Bunny, Un Verano Sin Ti (2022)
Las MarÍas in concert
Singer Peso Pluma
Comedian Ralph Barbosa
Comedian Jesus Castillo
Visual Artist Elsa Muñoz
Julian Randall's sure collection of essays, The Dead Don't Need Reminding
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