Institute for Latino Studies :: Momotombo Press :: Interview with Brenda Cardenas

	An Interview with Brenda Cardenas What follows is the second e-interview that poet Eduardo C. Corral graciously agreed to conduct for Momotombo Press. The questions were sent, and the answers received, in early Fall of 2006. —Francisco Aragón, September 2006 Interview: ECC: You write poems in Spanish. You mix/blend English and Spanish. Code switching, which Gloria Anzaldúa termed "a serpent's tongue," is a prominent characteristic of your work. Chicano/a scholars argue code switching disrupts the authority of English. Is there a political stance behind your code switching? Or is this linguistic play just a reflection of the way you think and speak? BC: There is definitely an aesthetic, artistic stance behind my code switching. What I mean by this is that the blend of languages (including occasional words in Nahuatl and Quechua) is one aspect of my musical score. I am experimenting with the harmonies, dissonances, and rhythmical nuances that emerge via the patois. When I work within and between languages, certain instances of alliteration or consonance might emerge that contain various double entendres. Certainly, I could create instances of alliteration, consonance, and assonance if I were writing in only one language, but those instances wouldn’t necessarily contain the multiple nuances of meaning that the multilingual instances contain. Yes, to some extent, the hybrid language reflects how I think and speak in certain circumstances, but I am more interested in how it reflects the larger notion of cultural transformation via syncretism and polyphony. It reflects my interest in the interconnectedness and juxtapositions of difference and similarity between seemingly disparate peoples, events, places, and experiences. And to that extent, it might also reflect a political/philosophical stance that I hold. I am certainly aware that I am asking readers who are not bilingual to step outside their comfort zone and accept something “other,” something “unofficial,” something in between. ECC: "By the Skin of Your Breath" recounts a brother's asthmatic attack. The poem is written in Sapphics, a syllabic form with strict line (breath) requirements. What came first? The content or the form? BC: The content and the form came together. I started writing the poem when I was taking a course in prosody. I loved that class because it taught me how to detect, scan, interpret and analyze the prosody of any poem written in formal verse, which made me a much better reader. It also taught me to deeply appreciate the marriage between content and form in any poem, even in a free verse poem, which has its own structure that the poet has created for it. I think the professor asked us to write a poem in one of several different forms. When I looked at the structure of Sapphics—all of the trochees and dactyls (falling rhythms)—as well as spondees (striking moments of emphasis), I felt that the Sapphic stanza would mirror the action and emotion happening in the poem. ECC: You're known as a poet with a commanding stage presence. Did you refine your performance skills in poetry slams? Or are you naturally extroverted? When you're drafting a poem do you keep in mind performance? BC: I think I am naturally extroverted, not necessarily a character trait that I’m proud of. I have never been on a slam team; in fact, I was only part of one reading that was officially called a “slam.” It was many years ago at the Green Mill in Chicago. Marc Smith was holding a sonnet slam that night. I didn’t know this when I decided to go to the Green Mill that night, but I just happened to have a sonnet with me, so I decided to read it. Before I knew what was happening, I had won that slam and about $20. But I never slammed again. I have, of course, practiced my performance skills over the years by doing many different kinds of poetry readings in a variety of settings, as well as during the years that I worked with Sonido Ink(quieto), which was a fairly raucous Chicano/a garage rock band. Yet no matter how many performances I do, I still get nervous every time! I no longer consciously think about performance when I’m drafting a poem, but I did do more of that during the Sonido Ink years; we did a lot of hanging out and jamming, so sometimes I was actually writing to a musical improvisation that the guys had happened upon. I no longer think about performance when I’m writing, but like many poets, I’ve always had a kind of music in my head when I write; the poems speak to me in very strong rhythms. ECC: One of my favorite poems in the chapbook is "Abuelo y Su Cuentos: Origin of the Bird-Beak Mole." Did you grow up surrounded by storytellers? Please describe some of their storytelling techniques. Has the folkloric tradition influenced the way you compose poems? How? BC: Yes, I grew up surrounded by storytellers, especially the paternal grandfather I am referring to in the poem (this one is autobiographical), my aunt Elia, and my maternal grandmother. I lived very close to all of these relatives at one point or another—upstairs from tia Elia in early childhood, across the park from my grandfather, and eventually next door to my grandmother—so I remember spending many afternoons listening to their stories. I was the kind of child who had very little use for other children except for a few special cousins; instead, I always wanted to be around adults, so I received especially large doses of their stories. My relatives’ storytelling was improvisational. Some of the stories they told were “true”—re-telling of things that actually happened or at least their versions of those experiences. Yet most of their stories were cuentitos, fairytales or tall tales that started as an answer to a child’s question or that riffed off of another conversation, and that they made up as they went along. Some of them taught life lessons or morals or communicated spiritual revelations. Some of them were merely suspenseful or humorous. I wasn’t conscious then of any particular techniques they used, so I can’t really remember them now. But I know that they always spoke in a very natural tone of voice as if to ask, “Why would anyone doubt the truth of this?” Their voices also contained a lot of emotion and emphasis, almost as though they were surprising themselves with directions their own tales were taking. When I relocated back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin last year after about 14 years living in other places, I moved into a place right across the park from my tia Elia who still lives in the same flat where I lived as a child. She is eighty years old now, and this past summer we took weekly walks in the park; she was still telling me stories—some of them more adult-to-adult family chisme—but some of them real stories. So, yes, I’d say that the folkloric tradition has influenced the way I compose narrative poems in that there is often some bit of traditional wisdom revealed in the poem, and most of these poems are fairly short; they do not require a long attention span. They are rich with imagery, and the voices of the characters in them are prominent. This said, I am writing fewer and fewer narrative poems these days. My interests have shifted to more lyrical verse and meditations. ECC: Five linocuts by Jeff Abbey Maldonado are positioned through out the chapbook. What prompted you to include his art? Did you choose linocuts that amplified the content of the poems? BC: I had collaborated with Jeff several times prior to this particular chapbook and found that our work shared some common cultural themes and aesthetic concerns. One of those collaborations consisted of Jeff providing each of six poets with a linocut print to which the poet was asked to respond with a poem. Each of the six poets also provided Jeff with a poem to which he was to respond with a linocut. I was one of the poets. By the end of the project, we had 12 sets of prints and accompanying poems, so we produced a year 2000 calendar with them and did several performances. I originally wrote “Medicine” for that project in response to Jeff’s print “Edge of Vision,” which is in the chapbook. It’s a very different poem now than it was in that calendar, but its genesis was in that collaboration. Jeff created his print “Revolution” in response to a poem of mine that I chose not to include in the chapbook, but I felt that the print also complimented my poem “Turning,” so I wanted to include it. I chose the rest of the prints because I felt that they either amplified the content of the poems or that their tenor resonated with the poems near them. ECC: You received an MFA from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. I often hear Latino/a poets complain they're the only writers of color in their MFA program. Were you the only Latina poet in the program? If so, how did you cope intellectually and emotionally? In what ways did your teachers and peers support you? BC: I was in the U-M MFA program from1993-1995, so that was over ten years ago now. At the time, I was the only Latina in the Poetry cohort of the program, and I don’t think there were any Latinos/as in the fiction cohort, but I can’t remember for sure. There were some other writers of color in the program whom I befriended, and together we held our own “unofficial” workshops or critique sessions on the side. There were also some very open minded and talented Caucasian writers in the program with whom I felt I could safely share my work, ideas, and concerns and from whom I could certainly learn—people like the fabulous New York poet Michele Kotler. Certainly, there were those who were closed minded and complained about my code-switching or the cultural references in my work that they did not understand, i.e. allusions to Mexican indigenous mythologies. But one will always encounter those kinds of people in any setting. In some ways, the most important thing I did for myself was to step outside of the MFA program and take cognate courses in the Program in American Culture, which housed Latino/a Studies, Native American Studies, etc. There I met both professors and graduate students (many of whom are now professors) in History, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Sociology, etc. who became some of my best friends and colleagues. Although these graduate students weren’t studying Creative Writing, several of them were writing poetry and creative non-fiction. They became a support network for me. At the time, a group of us formed a multicultural performance poetry troupe, which also included a few students from the MFA program. The courses I took, the professors with whom I studied, and the students with whom I collaborated outside of the MFA program had a huge influence on my work as a poet and on all of the work I’ve done since in creating and teaching U.S. Latino/a literature courses at universities and community colleges. One Latino/a Studies professor in particular who was incredibly supportive of my work as a poet and my beginning scholarship in Latino/a Studies was Dr. Frances Aparicio, who now teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After I finished the MFA, Dr. Aparicio hired me as a part-time adjunct professor for the Program in American Culture at U-M and allowed me to create and teach a study and praxis course in U.S. Latino/a Performance Art, which was an incredible experience. I also must say that Dr. Richard Tillinghast, who taught in the MFA Program, was always supportive of my work, in terms of its cultural content, its inter-lingual experimentation, and its performance elements. Near the end of my time at U-M, Dr. Tillinghast co-created a course with a professor from the MFA program in Visual Art and a professor from the School of Music, who taught graduate composers. It was a course in collaborative arts that gave me the opportunity to work with an incredibly diverse group of fellow graduate student artists. The artists were not only ethnically diverse, but they were also working in all kinds of different media from textiles to video/animation to new music composition. It was undoubtedly the best course that I ever took, and it influenced my work for years to come in that I continued for quite a while to focus on collaborative work—a performance art piece entitled “Oh Goya! Goya!” that I did with the dancer Evelyn Velez Aguayo, a conceptual theater piece that I did with Ping Chong and my fellow cast members, and the CD and numerous shows I did with Sonido Ink(quieto). I am currently trying to focus again on my solo poetry, and it is a poetry concerned more with the page than with its performance, but I imagine that I will return to collaboration again in the future. I find that fusion of minds to be a hybrid space similar to the space that inter-lingual poetry occupies—a vibrant, open and ever-changing space where whatever is made is in motion. *Eduardo C. Corral* holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems are featured in a chapbook published by Web del Sol. He won a “Discovery”/The Nation award in 2005. He’s the interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review.

An Interview with Brenda Cardenas

What follows is the second e-interview that poet Eduardo C. Corral graciously agreed to conduct for Momotombo Press. The questions were sent, and the answers received, in early Fall of 2006.

—Francisco Aragón, September 2006

Interview:

ECC: You write poems in Spanish. You mix/blend English and Spanish. Code switching, which Gloria Anzaldúa termed "a serpent's tongue," is a prominent characteristic of your work. Chicano/a scholars argue code switching disrupts the authority of English. Is there a political stance behind your code switching? Or is this linguistic play just a reflection of the way you think and speak?

BC: There is definitely an aesthetic, artistic stance behind my code switching. What I mean by this is that the blend of languages (including occasional words in Nahuatl and Quechua) is one aspect of my musical score. I am experimenting with the harmonies, dissonances, and rhythmical nuances that emerge via the patois. When I work within and between languages, certain instances of alliteration or consonance might emerge that contain various double entendres. Certainly, I could create instances of alliteration, consonance, and assonance if I were writing in only one language, but those instances wouldn’t necessarily contain the multiple nuances of meaning that the multilingual instances contain.

Yes, to some extent, the hybrid language reflects how I think and speak in certain circumstances, but I am more interested in how it reflects the larger notion of cultural transformation via syncretism and polyphony. It reflects my interest in the interconnectedness and juxtapositions of difference and similarity between seemingly disparate peoples, events, places, and experiences. And to that extent, it might also reflect a political/philosophical stance that I hold. I am certainly aware that I am asking readers who are not bilingual to step outside their comfort zone and accept something “other,” something “unofficial,” something in between.

ECC: "By the Skin of Your Breath" recounts a brother's asthmatic attack. The poem is written in Sapphics, a syllabic form with strict line (breath) requirements. What came first? The content or the form?

BC: The content and the form came together. I started writing the poem when I was taking a course in prosody. I loved that class because it taught me how to detect, scan, interpret and analyze the prosody of any poem written in formal verse, which made me a much better reader. It also taught me to deeply appreciate the marriage between content and form in any poem, even in a free verse poem, which has its own structure that the poet has created for it. I think the professor asked us to write a poem in one of several different forms. When I looked at the structure of Sapphics—all of the trochees and dactyls (falling rhythms)—as well as spondees (striking moments of emphasis), I felt that the Sapphic stanza would mirror the action and emotion happening in the poem.

ECC: You're known as a poet with a commanding stage presence. Did you refine your performance skills in poetry slams? Or are you naturally extroverted? When you're drafting a poem do you keep in mind performance?

BC: I think I am naturally extroverted, not necessarily a character trait that I’m proud of. I have never been on a slam team; in fact, I was only part of one reading that was officially called a “slam.” It was many years ago at the Green Mill in Chicago. Marc Smith was holding a sonnet slam that night. I didn’t know this when I decided to go to the Green Mill that night, but I just happened to have a sonnet with me, so I decided to read it. Before I knew what was happening, I had won that slam and about $20. But I never slammed again. I have, of course, practiced my performance skills over the years by doing many different kinds of poetry readings in a variety of settings, as well as during the years that I worked with Sonido Ink(quieto), which was a fairly raucous Chicano/a garage rock band. Yet no matter how many performances I do, I still get nervous every time!

I no longer consciously think about performance when I’m drafting a poem, but I did do more of that during the Sonido Ink years; we did a lot of hanging out and jamming, so sometimes I was actually writing to a musical improvisation that the guys had happened upon. I no longer think about performance when I’m writing, but like many poets, I’ve always had a kind of music in my head when I write; the poems speak to me in very strong rhythms.

ECC: One of my favorite poems in the chapbook is "Abuelo y Su Cuentos: Origin of the Bird-Beak Mole." Did you grow up surrounded by storytellers? Please describe some of their storytelling techniques. Has the folkloric tradition influenced the way you compose poems? How?

BC: Yes, I grew up surrounded by storytellers, especially the paternal grandfather I am referring to in the poem (this one is autobiographical), my aunt Elia, and my maternal grandmother. I lived very close to all of these relatives at one point or another—upstairs from tia Elia in early childhood, across the park from my grandfather, and eventually next door to my grandmother—so I remember spending many afternoons listening to their stories. I was the kind of child who had very little use for other children except for a few special cousins; instead, I always wanted to be around adults, so I received especially large doses of their stories. My relatives’ storytelling was improvisational. Some of the stories they told were “true”—re-telling of things that actually happened or at least their versions of those experiences. Yet most of their stories were cuentitos, fairytales or tall tales that started as an answer to a child’s question or that riffed off of another conversation, and that they made up as they went along. Some of them taught life lessons or morals or communicated spiritual revelations. Some of them were merely suspenseful or humorous. I wasn’t conscious then of any particular techniques they used, so I can’t really remember them now. But I know that they always spoke in a very natural tone of voice as if to ask, “Why would anyone doubt the truth of this?” Their voices also contained a lot of emotion and emphasis, almost as though they were surprising themselves with directions their own tales were taking. When I relocated back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin last year after about 14 years living in other places, I moved into a place right across the park from my tia Elia who still lives in the same flat where I lived as a child. She is eighty years old now, and this past summer we took weekly walks in the park; she was still telling me stories—some of them more adult-to-adult family chisme—but some of them real stories. So, yes, I’d say that the folkloric tradition has influenced the way I compose narrative poems in that there is often some bit of traditional wisdom revealed in the poem, and most of these poems are fairly short; they do not require a long attention span. They are rich with imagery, and the voices of the characters in them are prominent. This said, I am writing fewer and fewer narrative poems these days. My interests have shifted to more lyrical verse and meditations.

ECC: Five linocuts by Jeff Abbey Maldonado are positioned through out the chapbook. What prompted you to include his art? Did you choose linocuts that amplified the content of the poems?

BC: I had collaborated with Jeff several times prior to this particular chapbook and found that our work shared some common cultural themes and aesthetic concerns. One of those collaborations consisted of Jeff providing each of six poets with a linocut print to which the poet was asked to respond with a poem. Each of the six poets also provided Jeff with a poem to which he was to respond with a linocut. I was one of the poets. By the end of the project, we had 12 sets of prints and accompanying poems, so we produced a year 2000 calendar with them and did several performances. I originally wrote “Medicine” for that project in response to Jeff’s print “Edge of Vision,” which is in the chapbook. It’s a very different poem now than it was in that calendar, but its genesis was in that collaboration. Jeff created his print “Revolution” in response to a poem of mine that I chose not to include in the chapbook, but I felt that the print also complimented my poem “Turning,” so I wanted to include it. I chose the rest of the prints because I felt that they either amplified the content of the poems or that their tenor resonated with the poems near them.

ECC: You received an MFA from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. I often hear Latino/a poets complain they're the only writers of color in their MFA program. Were you the only Latina poet in the program? If so, how did you cope intellectually and emotionally? In what ways did your teachers and peers support you?

BC: I was in the U-M MFA program from1993-1995, so that was over ten years ago now. At the time, I was the only Latina in the Poetry cohort of the program, and I don’t think there were any Latinos/as in the fiction cohort, but I can’t remember for sure. There were some other writers of color in the program whom I befriended, and together we held our own “unofficial” workshops or critique sessions on the side. There were also some very open minded and talented Caucasian writers in the program with whom I felt I could safely share my work, ideas, and concerns and from whom I could certainly learn—people like the fabulous New York poet Michele Kotler. Certainly, there were those who were closed minded and complained about my code-switching or the cultural references in my work that they did not understand, i.e. allusions to Mexican indigenous mythologies. But one will always encounter those kinds of people in any setting.

In some ways, the most important thing I did for myself was to step outside of the MFA program and take cognate courses in the Program in American Culture, which housed Latino/a Studies, Native American Studies, etc. There I met both professors and graduate students (many of whom are now professors) in History, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Sociology, etc. who became some of my best friends and colleagues. Although these graduate students weren’t studying Creative Writing, several of them were writing poetry and creative non-fiction. They became a support network for me. At the time, a group of us formed a multicultural performance poetry troupe, which also included a few students from the MFA program. The courses I took, the professors with whom I studied, and the students with whom I collaborated outside of the MFA program had a huge influence on my work as a poet and on all of the work I’ve done since in creating and teaching U.S. Latino/a literature courses at universities and community colleges. One Latino/a Studies professor in particular who was incredibly supportive of my work as a poet and my beginning scholarship in Latino/a Studies was Dr. Frances Aparicio, who now teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After I finished the MFA, Dr. Aparicio hired me as a part-time adjunct professor for the Program in American Culture at U-M and allowed me to create and teach a study and praxis course in U.S. Latino/a Performance Art, which was an incredible experience.

I also must say that Dr. Richard Tillinghast, who taught in the MFA Program, was always supportive of my work, in terms of its cultural content, its inter-lingual experimentation, and its performance elements. Near the end of my time at U-M, Dr. Tillinghast co-created a course with a professor from the MFA program in Visual Art and a professor from the School of Music, who taught graduate composers. It was a course in collaborative arts that gave me the opportunity to work with an incredibly diverse group of fellow graduate student artists. The artists were not only ethnically diverse, but they were also working in all kinds of different media from textiles to video/animation to new music composition. It was undoubtedly the best course that I ever took, and it influenced my work for years to come in that I continued for quite a while to focus on collaborative work—a performance art piece entitled “Oh Goya! Goya!” that I did with the dancer Evelyn Velez Aguayo, a conceptual theater piece that I did with Ping Chong and my fellow cast members, and the CD and numerous shows I did with Sonido Ink(quieto). I am currently trying to focus again on my solo poetry, and it is a poetry concerned more with the page than with its performance, but I imagine that I will return to collaboration again in the future. I find that fusion of minds to be a hybrid space similar to the space that inter-lingual poetry occupies—a vibrant, open and ever-changing space where whatever is made is in motion.

Eduardo C. Corral holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems are featured in a chapbook published by Web del Sol. He won a “Discovery”/The Nation award in 2005. He’s the interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review.