Julian Gewirtz Interviews Carmen Giménez Smith at Los Angeles Review of Books
What does it mean to be a "literary citizen?" In Julian Gewirtz's conversation with Carmen Giménez Smith, the poet and publisher reveals her influences, writing process, and more.
JULIAN GEWIRTZ: To start, I’m interested in understanding which identity you came to first. Were you writing poetry long before you ever thought about being an editor?
CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH: When I was in high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I was on the school paper. I loved language and I didn’t really know anything about grammar but I knew I wanted to be involved with writing. And I also liked the production part — in those days, you had to do it on a piece of paper, with glue. Then I wanted to be a fiction writer, and that didn’t work out, and I came to poetry because of my love of language. I studied at San Jose State with Alan Soldofsky and he taught me two essential things: one is how to do a close reading, and the other is how to be a literary citizen. He ran the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State, which was just a phenomenal reading series, and I was his assistant. I was folding programs, I was showing people around, and I was getting to spend time with these amazing poets and learn from them and see them as people, which as a young Latina was important because I didn’t see myself in that world. Alan Soldofsky also introduced me to Juan Felipe Herrera’s work, which has also been hugely influential, both on my poetry and in terms of literary citizenship because he is the consummate citizen.
Later in my life, when I felt that I was a better poet — because I wasn’t that great of a poet for a long time, I really had to work hard to become a better poet — when I started feeling more confident, I started looking around and thinking about materiality, and how much I loved the book object. So I decided to start a press. I’m probably the most disorganized person you’ll ever talk to, so there was a way in which I expected it to be [just] this thing that I tried. But it was sustained, in part, because my husband is fantastic. He did the website; he designed the books; he edited; and we started framing a context for poetry — and fiction, too, but primarily I do the poetry — that embodied a kind of lyric subjectivity that was also engaged with a kind of politics. Luckily, after all these years, that’s what this press is. Now we have an enormous volunteer staff, and the things they’re choosing, and thinking about, and the way they’re approaching and promoting books — all of that is them. They’re brilliant. J. Michael Martinez, Sarah Gzemski, Diana Arterian, Suzi F. Garcia, all those folks. They’ve really taken the wheel from me. One of the projects I’ve recently started is Infidel Poetics. Since the beginning, I’ve wanted to do a short-form poetic series because I felt that critical books sometimes take so long to get published, and I also wanted it to be a space in which people who were writing criticism could experiment with form. That’s primarily what I’ve been working on lately. I’m so delighted to get to work with these amazing writers.
Continue at LARB.