Poet Jose Antonio Rodriguez and his Shallow End of Sleep

You should check out this interview with first-book author Jose Antonio Rodriguez, whose debut collection The Shallow End of Sleep was published this year by Tia Chucha Press. Mexican-born Jose Antonio Rodriguez was raised in south Texas and has just received his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. Lauro Vazquez of the Letras Latinas Blog (blog of the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame) introduces Rodriguez with admiration:

Jose Antonio Rodriguez’s poems are unlike any I have read. I imagine that for the most part poets are comfortable with the idea of populating the page with words that will inhabit these white spaces. But Jose’s poems refuse to simply fill in white space. His poems have an oral quality to them—they beg to be heard more than being read or written. There is a feeling of discordant conversation, where speech is the beginning of acknowledging that which muffles the everyday poetry necessary for survival. Where despite the oppressive violence of poverty, where despite all that displacement, language remains and it remains with all its possibilities for transcendence.

Rodriguez tells Vazquez in the conversation that the landscape of south Texas is a defining influence for his work ("The bridge with its barbed wire and police dogs looms large in my imagination because my family crossed it constantly and it never felt normal or comfortable showing identification to an armed officer to cross back to what I considered home"). They talk about feeling bifurcated by that environment, how it relates to language and identity:

LV: In “Freshman Class Schedule” you begin to put words —to name and perhaps deconstruct—this feeling of bifurcation. You write of your academic success and how despite these achievements you are still stuck, still “brown:” “Brown like the Dairy Queen workers/ Brown like the drop-outs/ Brown like the juvies/ Brown like the machos.” Now this poem is a very moving depiction of that struggle, of feeling very much American but being reminded of one’s place, of one’s brownness and the shame that comes with that brownness. Would you agree that this poem and many of the poems in this collection subvert that shame and turn it into a medicinal balm for the bruises and wounds of negotiating a new identity in the U.S.? And could you comment a little on how you arrived at this?

JAR: One of the aims was to articulate shame, its sources and its power. Whether this articulation is soothing or medicinal, I'm not sure. I suppose that's up to the reader. In some of the poems it may be, in others it may be unsettling or disorienting -- all valid responses. But I do think that the articulation itself can serve as the first step toward transcending shame. Much of its distorting power, how it can warp the self, is that it necessitates silence on behalf of the wounded, it demands it in fact. So I thought, can I begin to map a way out of it by having a narrator who may not be empowered enough to take on the sources of shame but is beginning to acknowledge them, bring them to the surface, to language.

LV: Another theme in your poems is the violence of restrictive space, of a landscape of economic hardship closing in, constricting the physical spaces inhabited by the voices in some of your poems. I am very much intrigued by your use of space and voice to explore this theme of space. Particularly in poems like “Between Snores and Polyester” and “Buick with Automatic Windows.” It seems to me as if these two poems themselves echo the oppression of those landscapes by acting as physical borders, by warping their form around these voices. And yet the voices in these poems also have begun to articulate, to map away out—through language—from these restricted spaces. What is the relationship between space—the violence of not having the adequate space—and language?

JAR: One attempt was to try to communicate the link between space and self, the idea that what we come back to every day, whatever living space that may be, can influence how we see ourselves -- not only that a house in ruins in this case can be representative of a broken (or bruised) spirit, but that the specific living conditions can come to symbolize how one interacts with the world. So that the speaker who is forced to share a tiny space with so many other bodies, for example, can become the speaker who is overwhelmed by the world outside of that living space. Or a voice muffled by so many other voices and bodies can become a voice that fails to bring clarity to the speaker. Hopefully the language communicates that confusion, but also the idea that as long as the confusion is being articulated, there is the chance that language will arrive at order or stasis or a satisfying narrative.

They also discuss internalized shame, the "liberating power of the resurfacing of the past," observational and narrative poetry, and how it feels to have a first book in hand. To read more about what Rodriguez is up to, the full interview, the first in what will be on on-going series, is here or check out his blog. You can also read (among others) his poem "Avocado."