Letras Latinas Hosts ire’ne lara silva in Conversation with Sarah A. Chavez

For Letras Latinas's new installment, "Nefelibata: Interviews with Latina Writers," curated by ire’ne lara silva, silva joins Sarah A. Chavez in a conversation about her new Dancing Girl Press collection called All Day Talking. (According to Letras, the word "nefelibata" means "cloud walker" or "one who lives in the clouds of their own imagination, or one who does not obey the conventions of society, literature, or art.") From Letras Latinas:

ils:

I loved the epigram by William Carlos William that you used at the beginning of this chapbook, “Be patient that I address you/ in a poem/there is no other/ fit medium.”

I thought the “Be patient” was significant because it said something about both poetry and grief—the poems exist and move between the griefs of the past to the griefs of the present to the griefs the reader knows the narrator will carry into the future—and patience is needed as both work themselves out in time. How did you feel the compacting and stretching of space, time, and language allowed you to find the astonishingly organic structures of these poems?

SAC:

It’s funny that you should mention both the compacting and stretching of time, because managing time is one of those things I’ve never been good at. Though I’ve gotten better as an adult, I’m incurably late to things that aren’t “mandatory” (like a job), and it takes extra preplanning and effort to be on-time for those things that are (like a job). If I’m doing something I enjoy, like reading or swimming, time compresses and what I think was only twenty minutes, in the rest of world was 2 hours. When I do tasks that allow my body to move separately from the mental-emotional parts of my brain, like walking or doing the dishes (sometimes even when reading and writing) the same happens. It’s like my brain and heart live in a space where past and present are braided together and the in-substantive nature of time gets even foggier. That’s one of the reasons I think this form – the epistle – ended up being the best avenue for these poems. Letters require the writer to make contextual connections, even when the letters are written to someone they know very well. Even informative letters imply a kind of reflection, and reflection and time are inseparable. I think my natural inclination toward universal connectivity, particularly psychologically regarding past experiences and actions dictating present reactions and choices, including those affecting interactions with the people around us, helped me with language choices. Those language choices and the way recollection and reflection drive both the individual poems, as well as the collection as a whole, made the structuring and order of the poems in the collection feel organic; they follow the organic push/pull, looping around and back in on itself of memory. [...]

Continue at Letras Latinas.